I WASN’T embarrassed and such embarrassment cannot be generated in me based on what happened in my life, but I was surprised when former PPP executive and former long serving Permanent Secretary, Hydar Ally, recalled on the Freddie Kissoon Show that he remembered me as a UG student wearing a pair of pin-up rubber slippers on the campus.

Hydar Ally has a huge memory because that was back in 1974 when that pair of half-dead slippers was all the footwear I had to use to walk through the abandoned train line to reach UG. Even as a UG student, poverty was my companion, so imagine what it was like growing up in Wortmanville without food.

Someone needs to give those two billionaires, Nigel Hughes and Terrence Campbell, a lecture on who or what a scrapehead is. Nigel and Campbell in an ugly rejection of basic West Indian sociology went to the site of the accidental death of Adriana Younge at Tuschen, East Bank, Essequibo, and wax lyrical about the need of Guyanese to understand the depressed economy of the people who tried to burn down Region 3, 4 and 5 on Monday, April 28, after the father of Adriana, Subrian Younge, shouted across Guyana that he cannot accept the autopsy finding of his daughter.

Hooligans, goons and thugs, riding on shiny metal bikes that cost a fortune, after Younge’s emotional boom, began to beat up people, loot and burn business places and tried to burn down infrastructural standings in the Regions mentioned above. Campbell and Hughes then told the Guyanese people that they must be sympathetic to the people who rampaged that night, referring to them as scrapeheads who need society’s understanding and assistance.

Campbell, if he lives a hundred years from now, will not understand what poverty is. By his admission, he has been a successful (his word) businessperson for the past 40 years. If Campbell is in his early sixties and has been enjoying money for the past 40 years, then Ravi Dev is right – Campbell is a billionaire. Hughes was born into wealth; his dad was one of Guyana’s most successful lawyers.

What do these men know about the lives of scrapeheads? I was one of Georgetown’s most authentic scrapeheads. There was no money in Wortmanville in my teenage days to buy food, much less a Harley Davidson that the rioters rode on the afternoon and night of April 28, when they beat and robbed people.

Our motorcycle in Wortmanville was a tennis roll and an intestinal slice of salami from Mr. Lee. That had to last you for the entire day. Mr. Lee was a Chinese shop owner at the junction of Norton and Hardina Streets. He was married to an African woman, who lived next door to us. Mrs. Lee was the only person my sister, Gwendoline, was afraid to take on in Wortmanville. Mrs. Lee was more boisterous and aggressive, and willing to fight, features for which my sister became infamous in Wortmanville.

Food and clothes were mirages for scrapeheads in Wortmanville, Lodge and Werk-Rust. You just live and die young, or go to jail or hope some angel comes along to save you. Imagine the temerity of Hughes and Campbell to refer to scrapeheads who buy expensive motorcycles and wear designer joggers and designer T-shirts as people the society needs to understand.

The only designer clothes we knew in Wortmanville were when the Christmas season came around and the folks of Georgetown would go window shopping at nights. The designer clothes you saw in the glass case were another world that you will never see in your lifetime.

Here is a piece of autobiography. I came out of poverty, became educated, became a university lecturer, and never bought designer clothes and never went to a barber and still do not go to a barber. I just cannot go in that direction when I think of the vortex of poverty I was once drowning in.

It was an insulting and demoralising vulgarisation of West Indian sociology for Nigel (he ought to know better; this is not the Nigel I once knew) and Campbell to eulogise people who are above the lumpen proletariat class and maybe fall into the category lower working class that robbed about 20 supermarkets and beat innocent people up.

Yes, I was a scrapehead, but I never robbed anyone. I never joined any group in Wortmanville that attacked and burned business places on D’Urban Street. Oh yes, I forgot. I was a scrapehead who stole things. At 16 years, I got a job at the PPP’s bookstore – Michael Forde Bookstore and I stole books from my workplace. I moved up by stealing books from the National Library. Those scrapeheads should start stealing books to learn about life.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.