A SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD lad who tried to be industrious by taking an ‘odd-job’ to help bring cash in his home where his father is stricken with a stroke, and his mother only has a menial job of weeding on a Guysuco Estate, started out enthusiastically last Friday, but soon ended up with ‘double trouble’.
Rakesh Mangar of Canje, Berbice, was helping to wipe the walls of a school in the neighbourhood when he fell, ‘one foot in, one foot out’ of a drum of water, landing heavily on his crotch. He was

badly injured and had to be rushed to the New Amsterdam Hospital.
Word of the disaster was quickly communicated to his mother who, together with an aunt, accompanied him to the Georgetown Public Hospital where he was transferred.
However when Rakesh reached the Accident and Emergency Unit of the GPHC, he was disoriented and in such pain, that on being called into the doctor’s room, he momentarily forgot all about his over-night bag, left it under a bench and went in to be examined by the doctor.
Moments later, when he remembered the bag, Rakesh returned outside in the triage area to retrieve it, but found, to his horror, that the bag had disappeared. He raised an alarm, and informed the nurses on duty. A search was made, but in vain. He said other patients and the nurses cautioned him that in future he should not make such a mistake, since there are vagrants, who lurk around, pretending to be waiting to be seen by doctor, but in fact are there to steal things.
A report was also made to the Police Outpost at the entrance to the hospital compound located on New Market Street, but nothing more has been seen or heard of the bag.
A rather beleaguered Rakesh, who spoke with the Guyana Chronicle last evening, lamented the fact that everything his mother had packed for him to use during his period of hospitalization has been stolen, his clothing, toiletries, passport and ID card. He said the passport had expired, but his mother advised him to walk with it and on being discharged from hospital, he would seek to have it renewed.
Rakesh is worried that he has no change of clothing, and has been wearing the same clothes ever since Friday when he had the mishap at Berbice.
“Auntie, I don’t have anything and there are things I really need here in hospital. I am just praying that something could happen so I could get my things back. It hard being in hospital without clothes and them things.”
He added to that, there was no chance for him to be paid for the job of cleaning he had undertaken at Canje.