A profound timeline of awakenings

I can remember around October/November past, there was a flu attack in Guyana unlike any we had. There were dry coughs, spats of fever, a kind of humid body heat that left the body feeling drained]; that flu was tiresome. I am not sure what it was, or if it was noticed and recorded by our medical authorities. I experienced it and credited it to over-work.

However, over the past weeks, many of us have discussed this experience, and how we dealt with it. We rushed to the familiar ‘Folk medicine chest’: lemongrass, guavas, limes, oranges, lemons, cinnamon and ginger, and an early morning feg of garlic, followed pby peeled orange, with the white skin-layer on.

That flu exited, and we returned to normal. Was that a COVID-19 attack, or just an uncanny flu with similar COVID-19 like symptoms?
Many scientists in the stream of Virology and zoonosis and the veterinarians and biologists who are the specialists no longer consider viruses as not alive.

They apply mechanisms to reproduce and evolve. Some have even suggested that they are the primordial movers of life on earth: see Discover Magazine, March 2006. One of the lessons COVID-19 will impart to many of us, especially people in positions who handle public funds and exploit and betray that trust, is the lesson-don’t take our money and invest it elsewhere because of your contempt for what you presume to be our lack of sophistication.

Regardless of where you have placed that stash, to live that movie star ‘prop’ life of your impoverished, irrational imagination, or even more realistic to escape the spite rooted political culture that prevailed by my grim experiences after 1992. Today we are all in some respects, fortunately trapped here. We are all colonised by a virus called COVID-19, and we cannot foresee what else lies in the future unless we awaken to the proven mechanisms to manage our physical environment, our ecosystems, leaving scant opportunities for the legions of amassed disease to descend upon us, because of our ineptness.

The question of managing our ecosystems, which earnestly began in Guyana, when the late President Hoyt pledged to the Commonwealth Heads of government at their meeting in Malaysia in 1989 to set aside in Guyana 3600 km² of primary rainforest in Guyana for the developing and demonstrating of methods of sustainable management of tropical forests, and of conserving biological diversity-ecosystems; Iwokrama Rain7forest programme. This lofty but practical concept escaped the post-1992 administration where a hunter-gatherer onslaught commenced, devoid of Gods and ‘Nature rituals’ that left nothing sacred. There was no creative celebration of the fauna or flora, no awareness of its human History, the bridges crossed or built, no celebration of its fundamental national iconography.

It was stripped of its folk being, Guyana had ceased to be a nation, and it became a space of self-serving abuse, where a vampiric assault on its foundations commenced, regardless of what consequences it entailed, it was the most fraudulent and lawless experience of its post Independence era because for the first time it was devoid of a natural, national vision.
With the advent of the David Granger administration, the link was re-established through the concept of development that declared itself ‘A Green Guyana’. Georgetown became habitable again, drains and canals were cleaned and when the rains came. We saw the results of the swift disappearance of would-be floodwaters.

Management of infectious diseases requires and demands a consciousness that applies itself to the human relationship with the environment. Laws and its enforcement that protect wildlife and its habitat from extermination, our iguanas, dwarf caimans, parrots etc. must be incorporated into our senses as important enough to require that we pay attention to their co-existence, understand why countries take drastic measures to protect their wildlife. They are tourist attractions, and our professionals warn that they contain virus and bacteria strains we don’t know exist, from affecting us.

It is we humans that interfere with as well as facilitate imbalances. We know that rats, mosquitoes and roaches spread germs, yet we don’t wash utensils we use, especially in the night, nor empty rubbish -that consists of food- it’s left overnight for who? Some humans don’t even brush their mouths, and wash their faces, next a roach is attracted by the food scent, and is picking up morsels on their sleeping lips, and he’ll try to get that piece of cheese stuck between your front teeth, and that’s when you’ll wake up lasing out.

Mosquitoes love stagnant water, like in the completely worn tyre you’re promising to throw away for the last few months. It just takes some scraps you dropped on the couch, or the bed while watching TV that slips under the bed, for a rat to move his tribe into your home. When we throw stuff in the bin at the back of the yard, there’s a micro-ecosystem out there. The rats forage in the bins, and the owl eats a few rats, the nocturnal food chain is served, don’t let it get to the point where you poison the rats and they, in turn, poison the owl. I understand this well.

I spent my formative years on the East Coast and could remember identifying the different ‘chicken hawks’ (we had no specific family names for these hawks) but years later in a conversation with a former school mate, he informed me that GUYSUCO had wiped out most of that population by spraying the cane fields to kill the rats, snakes etc. They, in turn, wiped out the hawks that ate the rats and snakes. Recently I was transfixed to see in Campbellville a black hawk in a coconut tree. These guys to my knowledge are no one’s pets, thus, they’re making a comeback.

The Coronavirus is the first Pandemic that has touched our region for this century, as our borders become attractive to other nationals, a frontier guard, military, but also trained to conduct medical examinations are necessary.
But what is heartening is a new thinking that is evolving. I was on a stakeholders expedition in the hinterland and was being driven to another village location.

The driver remarked somewhat grudgingly that the oncoming villagers had good resources and went on to explain what he meant, that they have certain birds and mammals that visitors photograph and video, also orchids. To refer to flora and fauna as resources is a giant step forward. This is a new thinking, the awareness that is an extension of what must be enveloped to establish Guyana as “The Green State.”