By: H.E. Sasenarine Singh, Ambassador to the Kingdom of Belgium and Netherlands and Permanent Representative to the European Union

THAT July afternoon in 2022, the sun hung low and heavy, spilling gold across the lands on the retired Ogle Sugar Estate. But these weren’t the cane fields I remembered that were neat, obedient rows of sugar cane marching toward the horizon, from my boyhood days when we used to roam searching for “gamma cherries” at Easter time. The bushes we saw in 2022 had taken over in a quiet rebellion. Cane stalks stood here and there like forgotten soldiers, but the trees had pushed through, and the grass rose high, swaying lazy in the warm breeze that came off the backlands. It was a wild, beautiful mess of green and gold, the kind of place that made you feel like you’d stepped into something older than yourself. Along the dam, the heliconias burned bright (Parrot’s Beak, people call them). Hundreds of them, orange and red, like the earth had caught fire and decided to stay that way.

My wife walked ahead, her voice drifting back to me on the wind. She was laughing about something, but the words got mixed in the open air. Every now and then she’d turn and point—”look there, that bend, I used to ride my bicycle right there”. Her eyes were bright with it, the way they get when you stumble back into a place that once held your whole world. And I understood. We both came from sugar. Our fathers had spent part of their lives in the industry, and maybe that’s why this land tugged at us the way it did, when we lived at Twin Palms. We wanted to fix things.

But this isn’t a story about GuySuCo, about balance sheets and income statements. I’ve done my time with those numbers. No, this one’s about the land itself. About what happens when the future shows up and asks for a seat at the table where memories have been sitting all along.

It didn’t take long for things to change. The Mahindra trucks came first, rumbling in from somewhere far away, driven by men from a company called “Ashoka”. Then the bulldozers, the graders, the endless dumping of truckloads upon truckloads of loam and sand happened. The three-coconut tree in the distance from our bedroom window and the little forest we had grown fond of were swallowed up by the noise and the dust. “Trenches” got filled. Canals disappeared. The earth was being reshaped, flattened, made ready for something bigger.

Those engineers worked like they were chasing something. We would fall asleep to the growl of their machines and wake up at four in the morning to the same sound, still going. Sundays were the only break. That’s when we’d see them at the Ogle Temple, or down in Plaisance Market, moving through the crowd like they belonged there. And in a way, they did. They’d become part of the place, part of its rhythm. They came to build something.

I remember meeting Dr Jaishankar, India’s External Affair Minister right there in that old GuySuCo bond at Ogle, which the Team from “Ashoka” started renting it for their offices and storage bonds. Strange how the world shrinks like that, how a man from India ended up in a dusty corner of Guyana, and it all makes sense somehow.

What got me, though, was the method. I’d never seen anything like it— “wick” drains, they called them. Long columns shoved deep into the soft clay to squeeze the water out, to make the ground strong enough to hold the weight of what was coming. It was patient work. Then came the “kentledge test”, those heavy concrete blocks piled on top of the earth to see if it would hold. And it did. Every step of it was a lesson in advanced engineering. Our walks became a kind of classroom, watching mud turn into something solid, watching memory make room for progress.

It wasn’t just a road anymore. It was a sign of what we could do when we stopped looking back and started looking forward.

These days, when I drive that bypass from Ogle to Eccles, I can hardly recognise the place. The wild fields are gone. The heliconias, the tall grass, the forgotten cane—all of it paved over and the adjoining lands are being developed currently under the leadership of President Irfaan Ali. In its place is that long ribbon of asphalt, smooth and certain, carrying people from the East Coast of Demerara to the East Bank of Demerara in minutes instead of hours. I see houses going up, and new life crawling along the edges. It’s the kind of development you’d see anywhere in the progressive world, and here it is, right here, on ground our fathers were once associated with and we also travelled.

We ought to stop and think about that sometimes. About how much has changed in just five years under President Ali. This road isn’t concrete and aggregate alone. It’s a promise kept. A door that was swung open.

Well done, Guyana. Well done!