I love my country. I need to say that first, because what follows can sound like the opposite if you are not listening closely enough.
I love Guyana the way you love the house you grew up in. You know where the floor creaks. You know which door sticks. And because you know it that well, you cannot walk past the cracks in the wall the way a visitor would. You see them every time. That is not complaining. It is ownership.
Here is what I see in our house: lives lost on roads to avoidable speeding; garbage bad enough to invite threats of jail under laws that went unenforced for years; families feeling the full weight of food prices; and a corruption score that remains a warning. All of it unfolding inside the fastest-growing economy in the hemisphere.
We are adding floors to a house where nobody went back and fixed the foundation.
I think some of it comes from a history of scarcity. When you grow up believing there is not enough, the person beside you can begin to look like competition rather than a fellow citizen. You grab first, rush ahead and reason later. Rules become something for people who can afford to wait.
But everybody in a house is connected, whether they like it or not. A leak in one room reaches every room eventually. The person who cuts the line, pads the invoice, takes the small thing, throws the bag over the fence or overtakes on the bend may believe they are getting ahead. They are really pulling a brick out of a wall they also live behind.
No house is kept by one person. It is kept when enough of the people inside decide that the standard is theirs to uphold, not somebody else's job to enforce. Upkeep is not a government service. It is pride. Without it, everything falls into ruin on its own, no matter how much money comes through the door.
They say Guyana is not a real place. It is. It is our house. The question is whether we are residents or people passing through.
I love my country, and I cannot look away from the cracks. I live here with my fellow Guyanese.
This reflection was first shared publicly on Facebook.
