I was in the transit lounge at Grantley Adams International Airport (GAIA) in Barbados en route to Saint Lucia on May 23, when I saw the first TV newsflash on Al Jazeera about the deadly fire in Mahdia, a deep mining community few ever heard of until that morning.

I’d just overnighted in Bridgetown after five days in Jamaica covering the opening of the Sandals Dunn’s Resort in Ocho Rios on May 19.
It was three years to the day since George Floyd was killed, giving life to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement – and of my own near fatal hit by a speeding vehicle that same day, stretching me out on a Castries sidewalk just like George did, only to survive where he didn’t.
Just before boarding on the final leg of my 14-hour flight by three aircraft between four Caribbean islands, the news about Mahdia hit me like a thunderbolt.

A lady next to me asked: “Where in Guyana is that?” and a lass next to her, reading from her phone, answered: “It’s the capital of the Potaro-Siparuni region, located near the centre of Guyana at an altitude of 1,245 feet… and the area is rich in gold and diamond, with small mining operations…”
To which I added, “It’s around 200 miles from the capital Georgetown and you need a two-hour flight to get there…”
I might have gotten time and distance wrong, but that’s the everlasting impression I got from my first visit, in 1993, to the distant town in what the average Guyanese coastal resident will call ‘the bush’.

I was only a few days into my new job as Editor of The Mirror newspaper when my good old friend and comrade, President, Dr Cheddi Jagan, asked whether I would be willing to personally represent him at a private wedding in Mahdia.
On the day I was to depart, with absolutely no idea where I was going, I told some colleagues at The Guyana Chronicle’s Sports Bar on Lama Avenue, Georgetown: “I will come back late this afternoon because I’m rushing to Mahdia to a wedding…”

The likes of Alan Fenty, Sharief Khan, Freddy Kissoon and Bert Wilkinson never forgot to forever remind me of that precious gem of a demonstration of my sheer Caribbean islander’s ignorance, not only the sheer size of Guyana, but how far Mahdia is from Georgetown.
But the amazing revelation of the contours of the geological wonders that make up Guyana’s vast interior made-up for the flight from the then Ogle airstrip on what could easily have been about the length of time and distance of a flight from Saint Lucia to Jamaica.

The Mahdia wedding involved a Saint Lucian family, several of which had long ago trekked into the little mining town in search of El Dorado and left linguistic and other cultural legacies that still flow through annual traditional cultural events like the La Rose flower festivals (in August) imported by the first set of ‘Pallawalla’ (French-creole-speaking Saint Lucians) to land there.
There I got my first introduction to really having to sleep with a mosquito net, how it actually feels to have Malaria — and unbelievable but amazingly true stories of living by law-of-the-jungle rules “in the bush”.

There I learned how the term ‘Pork-knockers’ came from description of early Saint Lucians introducing the practice of salting and sun-drying huge portions of pork for long-lasting availability.
I later learned from relatives in Linden also living and digging for gold in Mahdia about the necessary ultra-secrecy of personal security after striking gold or diamonds to avoid being targeted for theft, in circumstances where no one ever witnesses anything…
Mahdia has long emerged from back then, now having more community facilities and greater levels of interaction with the rest of the country.

Today’s tinderbox effect of IT devices on a generation that ‘cannot imagine life without Wi-Fi’ is alive as in Mahdia as everywhere else, infusing the community with all the attendant social ills.
As such, the telling effect of loss or deprivation of access to a cell phone in these circumstances is no less on today’s teenage generation than on a sole survivor washed-up on an unknown shore in stormy weather, with only a few minutes charge left on a cell phone.

But while I share the mourning and other natural expressions of normal human concern over the tragedy that was, in such circumstances I also always (almost automatically) look for the good that can come out of the bad – like, in this case, acceleration of whatever plans the government has for minding more for Mahdia, as with the recent reports of more scholarships and other opportunities for students, etc.

Like with indigenous and riverain communities scattered in Guyana’s hinterland and coastal regions, Mahdia also qualifies to share in the spread of increased earnings from carbon credits.
Indeed, just like Silica City is developing from virtually nothing and nowhere to tomorrow’s big somewhere in Guyana, so will the likes of Madhia and Linden, Agricola and Albouystown, Beterverwagting (BV) and Buxton, Sophia and Victoria, benefit from the new thrusts facilitated by the new national resource earnings, to propel them from the lingering effects of historical neglect to the upward elevator of clear inclusion in the new development paradigm.

Guyana today is fortunate to have oil and gas fueling its all-round development and it’s only natural to expect they’ll also energise better minding of earlier mining communities that contributed to national earnings but were historically locked out of or distanced from national development plans.

It’s understandable that the relatives of victims will have reason to think, talk and act about the murder charge now applied, while sociologists will offer better readings from different angles of what could have led to what happened.
By my thinking, however, Mahdia’s recent fatal misfortune can become a new catalyst for accelerated integration from peripheral to central state planning attention and action, way beyond mining.