Dear Editor,
I write, moved by the article in Tuesday’s, April 7, Kaieteur News, entitled “Region 1 to spend $114 million to build three new primary schools at Eyelash, Big Creek and Five Star.” I am filled with nostalgia, recalling people and times gone by. I want to commend our Ministries of Education and our Local Government and indeed all our Ministries and Agencies of Government, and the residents in their communities in taking this step. Join with me in welcoming our new villages of Eyelash, Big Creek and Five Star.
In the 1990s, Barama (plywood) and Golden Star (exploration) had a first look at a dozen or so prospective occurrences of gold and other precious minerals within Barama’s TSA (Timber Sales Agreement). None tuned out to be attractive enough for their further attention, but interest for small and medium scale gold mining in the area was sparked. In the 2000s, as Barama shifted its focus from Port Kaituma to Buck Hall and relaxed its monitoring of much of its TSA, many enterprising individuals began slogging along Barama’s extensive road and trails network (laid in to enable them to get to each and every tree as needed) with their metal detectors in hand. Five Star had been a known gold area – Eyelash and Big Creek were two new locations of the biggest “Shouts.”
Allow me a shout out to old, now deceased Mr. Gaskin of Matthew’s Ridge, my man in the Baramita, Matarkai area who regularly travelled to the three locations of Eyelash, Big Creek and Five Star. He had been an employee in the first manganese mining days of the 1950s/60s. In our first encounter soon after entering office in the early 1990s, he was pursuing NIS and other pension benefits for himself and other colleagues who were then still living.
I visited Eyelash at least twice, once on the way to the Higgins and others at Noseno. In Eyelash, I marveled at the large tent-city that had sprung up, a testament to what our ordinary people could do. How I wished that many more of us from Georgetown and our coast, could be there to see the pioneering life inherent in building our country, just as people from other countries have built their own countries before.
Old people like me who grew up on cowboy movies would know what El Paso and many big cities of today’s America’s West were like in their early wild west days of say the 1860s. One year, I travelled with the lady DCM of the US Embassy, in a big US helicopter to Port Kaituma, on a US medical outreach. Walking through Port Kaituma, at the height of the gold shout, she said, I feel like I have been transported back in time to our own Wild West, but with Toyota 4WDs and ATV’s instead of horses. I agreed that it was very much like their wild west moreover, I knew the equivalents of the old saloons where we could stop by.
Who knows what the communities of Eyelash, Big Creek and Five Star might develop into, in a hundred or two hundred years’ time? Our challenge now is to nurture these sparks and assist them in finding “Low Carbon Development,” pathways, utilizing in sustainable ways the mineral, timber, non-timber and agricultural resources present to provide diverse, sustaining economic livelihood activities in these new villages.
Our best wishes to our fellow citizens at Eyelash, Big Creek and Five Star.