Residents of Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, live their lives below sea level. The rising sea is an immediate threat and the city only survives thanks to a sea wall. Luckily, the President sees climate change as a business opportunity and is busy persuading Norway to hand over millions of dollars in return for promises to halt deforestation. This is not a popular strategy among gold and diamond miners and logging companies worried about the future of their industries. But it might mean the forest, which covers much of the country, is managed in a sustainable way.
Currently, Guyana is not short of timber and most of the buildings in Georgetown are beautiful, airy, wooden structures. There is even the world’s biggest wooden church. It’s a very attractive city but small for a capital and the streets feel almost empty.
The Guyanese population is from all corners of the world and historically many people were brought here rather than chose to come here. Slaves and later indentured labourers were shipped from Africa and India to work on tobacco and sugar plantations. This might go some way to explaining why today everyone is so desperate to leave. Guyana has the highest brain drain of any country in the world. People leave in huge numbers as soon as they are able, heading to the Caribbean islands, the USA or Canada in search of better opportunities and more money.
We have only been here for a few days and will be heading to Venezuela early next week, inevitably we have only just begun to find out what is happening here but there seem to be lots of interesting avenues to explore. Strangely, for a country everyone is trying to leave, I feel Guyana is a place worth coming back to.
