Making new starts, from race relations to medical standards
Woman's-eye View
I need to explain the title first. What is on my mind is the need for us to come out of the rut of the past, from which I, for one, have difficulty rising. I don't mean forget the past. I mean that we have to use the truth of the past to approach the present and the future in a different way - and that different way has to be made in the sense of being constructed from the ground up. The word "new" in the title and in the column that follows should be read in quotation marks. All our new starts are of course flawed: to choose one at random, the Constitutional reform process, which should be one road to a new start, has been inadequate in the depth of the changes it proposes and in the level of the public participation it has invited or permitted. But like all the other recent developments, it provides something that we can get our teeth in, if we will. The key area in which most of us now know that we have to make a new start is race. I want to indicate only one aspect of this here; I can't go further, since I am still thinking about what we did about race in the 1970s for what lessons I can learn. For now, what I believe is that if we had a moment in the late 1970s when there was a chance that people's economic interests would be more important to them than their different interests as members of different racial groups, we lost it. We can argue about the relative contribution of the errors we made, the assaults made against us, and global developments, but I don't think we can argue about whether the moment has gone. The moment we are in now, in Guyana and globally, is one where it is clearer that other interests - whether of class or any other - do not replace most people's sense of race identity, whether they feel and express that identity negatively or positively. Given this, the task of creating better race relations had to be taken up again in a new way. This is why the existence and functioning of the new race rights groups in Guyana should not be dismissed as divisive, I think, with the argument that "we are all Guyanese; we are not Indian or African or Amerindian". What they clearly do is express a division that is there, and expressing that division is a precondition for addressing it. It is the first time I know of that each of the three largest race/ethnic groups is organising on its own with a clear rights agenda. Expressing that division is healthier than continuing the pretence that it isn't there, in spite of the threat and sometimes, the reality that the assertion of group rights and the resistance to group wrongs may be unjust and inflammatory. Moreover, expressing the division of race in organisational form is part of the precondition for a new kind of alliance. In the 1970s, some time after the pre-party WPA was formed, the two separate groups, ASCRIA and IPRA, dissolved into it. This may have been the right act at that moment, but I am not sure that even in the 1970s, the majority of Guyanese saw it as possible for one organisation to represent their sometimes conflicting race interests. All this may stick in our craw but we have to deal with it. The formation of the new Medical Council is a possible new start of a different kind of importance than these issues of race, although lifting medical standards is also about life and death. There were statements and actions on both sides of the long dispute over the composition of the Medical Council that were - well, sad. For example, on the side of those opposed to the Minister of Health's behaviour, arguments against a quota for female representation was the same old argument about inclusion only on merit, as if the relative under-representation of women in any positions of decision-making ever have anything to do with merit (Check the "merit" of some of the men in the Parliament). I had to get that off my chest before saying how much I want to greet the words of the "new" Medical Council with a suspension of old grief, and to take them seriously. Both daily newspapers carried a report on Dr Walter Ramsahoye's election as Medical Council Chairman, but what caught my eye in the Stabroek News report was the subhead: "(Medical Council) Ready to Receive Complaints against Practitioners". This was amplified in the report itself in three statements: (1) "With the appointment of the new Council, members of the public are encouraged to file complaints against medical practitioners and the new Council is assuring that each complaint will be dealt with fairly and justly"; (2) "(The list of the Council's functions includes), "ensuring the proper maintenance of standards and professional conduct by medical practitioners and taking disciplinary action in case of default..."; and (3) "the Council expressed the wish that its members will be preoccupied with the elevation of standards and that it will uphold the law without fear or favour". The same issue of Stabroek News carries a letter which indicates why the Council has its work cut out for it. The writer complains about a lab that diagnosed her as having cancer of the breast and her discovery when she reached overseas that she did not; she also mentions that the Guyana Cancer Society has been receiving many complaints of wrong diagnoses. Someone should check on the money wasted sending people overseas to learn that they are not ill, while others who are ill languish here because there is no money for them to go overseas. These errors are causing, at best, trauma, at worst, an increased risk of death. Speaking of trauma, I remember the case of a young Amerindian girl, a few years ago, who was told to cut off her breast for a cancer that proved non-existent. Fortunately for her, as for the letter writer referred to above, she was able to go overseas to doublecheck. I also remember my own experience, where I was diagnosed with the wrong cancer because the slides were improperly made. Since the reports and the letter mentioned above were published there have been other developments: an open letter to the Guyana Medical Council, the Guyana Medical Association, the Minister of Health and "whoever else it may concern" from the Cancer Survivors Action Group, calling for action to improve the standard of lab work in the country. There have also been responses from the Secretary of the Guyana Medical Council (gentle ladies", Dr George?), Dr Ramsahoye in his personal capacity, the Guyana Bureau of Standards and Dr Simon. CSAG, of which I am a member, is waiting to see what action will be taken, although it is more confused than before over who has ultimate responsibility to ensure lab standards. One question for me is whether those who make complaints against the labs have what it takes to do their part in cleaning up the labs - whether people are going to be willing to make formal complaints, in their own names. Too many have said to me - and to others - that they would be afraid to. But the alternative is to continue what is in effect gossip and rumour-mongering. Once before, when I said that in Guyana we don't have the courage to speak out about what is wrong, a critic wrote that I can afford to say these things because I don't have children to support. Leave aside that the critic has absolutely no way of knowing how many people I support, the criticism missed the point: not to make formal complaints and protests carries the terrible danger that the danger you do not complain of persists and grows worse. How can we be more afraid of speaking out than of the consequences of silence? We have to make new starts, the sooner, the better.
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