THERE is a vital need to revive the community spirit of yesteryears
There are still persons in the older generation who remember their growing-up years as a time when the entire community raised the children of the villages in rural enclaves.
Today, as the nation reels from the emerging and progressively violent and criminal nature of children gone astray, it has become imperative for community leaders to once again revive the community spirit of yesteryears, when anyone’s child was cared for and looked over by the entire community.
Several years ago, one single mother who had re-located to the city from a village in Essequibo because she had been transferred by her employers to a city branch of the business establishment for which she worked, discovered to her horror that her teenaged son had started smoking marijuana with youths who attended the school to which he had been transferred.
She immediately had him transferred back to his old school in Essequibo and sent him to live with her eldest brother, who brooked no nonsense – was loving but strict with his nephew. The boy could not make a move without it being reported to his uncle by someone in the village and, subsequently, being unable to sneak around to access the marijuana, much less smoke it, he eventually kicked the habit.
Today he is a renowned, highly-respected doctor working in the city. If it had not been for the intervention of a loving family member, who was supported by an entire village, he might have become a lost soul, another statistic of the underground world of substance abusers.
But even in rural communities that spirit of sharing and caring is petering out and one cannot help but wonder if the plethora of problems – drug and alcohol use and abuse, teenage pregnancies, violence in and out of schools, disrespect to elders and authority figures, including teachers, even criminal activities that sometimes descend to murder of victims, etcetera, that are facing the society, with the major number of culprits being teenagers, could not have been minimised, if not altogether eradicated if the community spirit still prevailed in the society.