Justu past that last one, there is a plot of land – to call it a “village” would be frankly dishonest – known as Kastev. Whereas a leisurely drive along the windy highway would be enough to give you a lingering look at other places on the Vreed-en-Hoop to Parika route, blink once after passing the Lucky Star Chinese restaurant at Meten-Meer-Zorg and you would have flown past Kastev.

That plot of land boasts a total of 33 houses, a school and a Neighbourhood Democratic Council building. Somehow they’ve also managed to pack a playfield in there. And a museum, a place where one man has managed to pack his decades-long passion for the history and heritage of his country into a couple of rooms no more than a couple of square metres of combined floor and wall space.

Enter the Guyanese Heritage Museum, the dream come defiantly to life of Gary Serrao. A dream that had a genesis in a nightmare of sorts.

The Genesis of Passion Serrao grew up on Durban Street, and then on Lync Street in Georgetown. One of things he tells young guests to the expansive building, or rather buildings which constitute his home is that the person who built the place grew up as a small boy in a small home where mud formed part of the architecture.

The small boy seems to have been fairly bright. Serrao’s intelligence (he would never call it that) secured him a partial scholarship to a private school and then, eventually, an education in engineering in England. As much as this success catapulted Serra out his less fortunate circumstances however, it resulted in a far more serious dislocation.

“I spent twenty one years in England,” Serrao told Sunday Chronicle, “and during the time in England, I was always homesick. There was not a time when I wasn’t homesick, I always wanted to come back home.”

In addition to the longing in itself for the place he spent the first twenty two years of his life, he found England at the time a place he felt very uncomfortable living in. For him, the major discomfort was the level of racism he saw there.

“Not that I had encountered racism personally,” stated Serrao, “but I was exposed to racism. It’s not difficult to understand. With me having a light complexion, people would say things about people of colour and it would affect me quite a lot. I grew up believing that all of us have a right to be on this planet...Maybe I was a little bit sensitive but I saw a lot of hate there.”

Serrao said that he was always dreaming of coming back home but since circumstances did not permit it, he did just the opposite: he developed a way of bringing home to him.

“I started collecting things that were Guyanese,” stated Serrao. Anything that had the mark of his native land, he collected: stamps, coins, pots, pans, anything. He recalls spending an entire month’s salary on a map drawn by Mr. Joseph Hadfield, after whom Hadfield Street in Georgetown is named. The date on the map read August 1, 1838.

“I thought this was a very emotion thing to have,” said Serrao, “a very spiritual thing. Not in the religious sense because that was the end of apprenticeship. I mean slavery was actually abolished in 1834 but some historians would argue that that was the true Freedom Day because that was when people could go wherever they wanted.”

In time his loneliness fuelled his drive for the acquisition of Guyanese artefacts and his collection grew and grew.

“It was like a passion,” joked Serrao during our interview with him, “Or it’s safe to say it was an obsession. I neither smoked nor drank, I just collected things that were Guyanese.”

A Revelation By the time that Gary Serrao came back to Guyana he had had an extensive collection of things, all the objects which kept him whole until he could return to his ‘pays natal’. On arriving in Guyana, he set out to establish an eco-tourism resort in the interior. That venture was a flop. Unscrupulous contractors and workers robbed him blind, and a beaten Serrao and his partner and wife, Shaimoon, saw millions of investment dollars just vanish.

It was during this dark time that friends who visited their house at Kastev suggested the Serrao open his collection of Guyanese artefacts to the public. We asked Serrao how he could accept the idea of turning his home into a museum. His philosophy on that point is simple and straight forward. He may have acquired them, but in truth no one can own a country’s heritage. All an individual can hope to do is to keep it in trust for those to come. With that decision, the Guyanese Heritage Museum was born.

The Guyanese Heritage Museum The front of the building in the first street in Kastev (it has about two, not including the highway) where the museum is located is not remarkable. Serrao admits that he himself has seen persons turn up at the front of the gate only to turn back and go away unimpressed. Those who have done so would have missed an experience. Open the metal gate and head to the right, turn left and walk towards the doorway. Most likely the grillwork will be locked but ring the bell on the wall to your left, and while you wait for Gary to come, wearing his trademark plain shirt, khaki short pants and slippers, have a chat with the monkey in the mango tree to your right.

When an enthusiastic Gary Serrao greets you and leads you in, hold your breath and wait for it. The comfort, the warmth and earthiness which hits you can be disconcerting. An old 1960s calculating machine sits comfortably next to an earthen jar than could easily be one hundred years its predecessor. The mostly nibbi chairs arranged around the small courtyard practically beckon you to sit, throw back, grab a book from the nearby bookshelf and forget the world from which you came. With the small raised pool surrounded by plants, there is an overwhelming sense that Gary and Shaimoon have some managed to create an oasis in the heart of coastal farmland. When Pepperpot visited the Guyanese Heritage Museum a week ago, we joined Gary as he took some visitors on a tour. The museum proper is really just a couple of rooms on the first floor of Gary’s four storey place, but the small space is packed with hundreds of years of Guyanese history. A room occupied mostly by maps is old enough to have certain words end in letters that have become vestigial and fallen off today. In another room Gary points to some glass balls previously used as floats for fishermen’s nets over a century ago.

Pointing to a high shelf on which rests some bowl shaped receptacles, Gary gives a little spot quiz to his guests – one of whom guesses correctly that the receptacles are in fact chamber pots. The ‘curator’ explains that the metal pot was the one used by the lower classes primarily during the colonial era, while the upper classes had the luxury of using the porcelain ones. He points to the metal one and tells his guests that he had to use a metal chamber pot when he was growing up.

“That one’s not mine though,” he adds quickly, causing a stir of laughter. For anyone with even the slightest interest in the history and heritage of Guyana, this place is a treasure trove. Open sesame, and you find a wealth of chamberpots, maps, telephones, hundred year old drinking bottles, masks, bicycle licenses, stamps, pots, papers, lamps, you name it. The tools and papers of generations of our ancestors abound here. But there is also something else, something that emerges even through the optimism and bonhomie that Gary Serrao exudes from the moment he greets you. Under the surface of all that is brilliant and shiny in the Guyanese Heritage Museum is a patina of grief. It isn’t readily apparent but there are tangible manifestations. The cloth covering the old currency in the glass display case from the ravages of ultraviolet light is old and tattered linen instead of smooth flawless black felt. The refuse of the toil of termites litter a 1970 issue of Thunder, the PPP’s organ. As well-meaning as Gary Serrao is, as much as he has done, as large as his collections is, the Guyana Heritage Museum is in fact failing.

A dilemma Gary Serrao is the first to admit this. He says that Guyanese are not interested in their heritage, but with a magnanimity that is typical of him, he offers the excuse that life is hard for the majority of Guyanese. He speaks of long hard days at work, and short weekends to relax and do chores, of money that has to be allocated everywhere else except to the immersion into history that his museum offers.

Noting that his museum enjoyed little patronage after he opened it several years ago, Serrao had the idea of turning his home into a guest house to subsidise the costs of running the place. Although his room prices are far from exorbitant, although the roof of the Toucan Guest House (as he eventually named it) has a splendid view of the Atlantic Ocean and the Island of Leguan on one side, and Kastev and sugar cane fields on the other, although the nights on the West Coast can be magical with the benefit of certain view, even the guest house is not doing all that well.

Serrao’s excuse for the rest of us is that we do not have time to travel, and again, there is little money, time et cetera… During the research for this article, Gary Serrao repeatedly insisted that the article not be about him, for it to be about the museum and that abstract and nebulous thing called Guyanese heritage. Serrao is a talker, speaking non-stop on tours, interspersing historical facts with his own personal maxims and credos. Even Shaimoon observes that he is the talker in the relationship.