By FREDDIE KISSOON From kaieteurnewsonline

What it is about this country that Caribbean people and other nationalities do not like? When we had Cricket World Cup, the fixtures placed New Zealand in Guyana. Yet most amazingly, when their team was competing in Guyana, the New Zealand fans were enjoying themselves in St. Lucia.

During the match, a former New Zealand cricketer who was doing commentary made a flippant remark about Guyana and was quickly pounced upon by his fellow commentator, Colin Croft. The story about this “Guyana thing” has a long history.

For some reason, in the Caribbean family of nations, people look down upon Guyana. There has to be an explanation. Before we theorize, let’s look at the reaction of Curtly Ambrose to a question put to him by an Antiguan sports journalist.

In the upcoming Caribbean Premier League, Curtly Ambrose of Antigua has been assigned to coach the Guyana team. In an interview aired on Sunday night, the interviewer solicited Ambrose’s feeling about going to Guyana. Ambrose paused and uttered the following, “I’m a professional; I will work where I have to go.”

Then Ambrose went off the topic and spoke of his coaching experience. Curtly Ambrose never mentioned the word Guyana, and did not answer the journalist’s question about how he feels about going to Guyana.

Anyone who looked at that interview and has a little exposure to psychology can tell that there was a Freudian dimension to the avoidance of an answer by Ambrose. You can tell that psychologically, he wasn’t enthralled with Guyana. He didn’t want to praise Guyana.

The story of this “Guyana attitude” can be seen everywhere you go in the Caribbean. It comes from ordinary citizens to the middle classes, the business world and ruling politicians.

Then Prime Minister of Jamaica, Bruce Golding, accused this country of being an international beggar. For decades now, BWIA renamed Caribbean Airlines Limited, has treated the Guyanese people with obnoxious contempt that few countries in the world would ever put up with. Canada moved its consular services to Trinidad in the eighties and despite the phenomenal Hoyte years and twenty years of PPP rule, the Canadian consuls aren’t coming back to Guyana.

There are three broad clusters of explanation for this “Guyana attitude.” One is that Caribbean people at a psychic level see Guyana as not belonging to the family of West Indian islands and thus will never embrace it.

It is like how the entire continent of Europe sees Turkey. Come another hundred years and European people will not recognize Turkey as being an integral part of the continent

Secondly, Caribbean people are fed up with Guyana. For over seventy years, they have been seeing this country as being in perpetual turmoil. For them it is a cursed land that God has abandoned. In Guyana, they tell you, for almost four decades, all you see is social and political instability.

If these are the reasons why Caribbean people look down on Guyana, how do you explain the attitude of the New Zealand fans and the rest of the world? It has to do with the bestiality of primitiveness. In comparison with our Caricom neighbours and Latin America, Guyana is a shockingly poor, underdeveloped land, perhaps in the eyes of foreign journalists, a simple swampland.

I always remember the uncontrollable exclamation of then student leader at UG, Jason Benjamin. Benjamin made a short visit to UWI in Jamaica and on his return said to me, “Freddie, if yuh see dem people student gym; it is more modern than the whole of UG.” Young people, when they leave Guyana, will not return because what they see in the outside world in comparison with Guyana is a dog kennel versus the palace of an Arab sultan. I honestly doubt that there is a clean toilet in any public institution in this country.

When Ambrose comes here, can he survive a heart attack or apoplexy? What will happen to him when he sees the drains in Georgetown, the bushes in Georgetown that look like real mountains, the stink, ubiquitous garbage, the sewage overflows, the dilapidated University of Guyana, the outdated 18th century Theatre Guild, the schools without windows and toilets.

What is going to happen to Curtly Ambrose after he leaves the cocktail function of the Convention Centre and as his car turns east onto the Railway Embankment, it hits a cow because there are no street lamps on that highway east of the Convention Centre.

The place is so dark in the night that if VS Naipaul should visit Guyana, and look at the particular street, he will write a sequel to An Areas of Darkness and title it, An Area of Madness.

For more on this story go to:

http://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2013/07/10/psychoanalyzing-curtly-ambroses-response/