Easter… in Rupununi

Your Eyewitness was soooo to be part of a convoy of vehicles threading their way to the Rupununi Rodeo – held under the theme “Wild & Bold, Rupununi Stories Unfold.”!! What better way to honour our pioneering forbears who opened up our interior savannahs by carving out some of the largest cattle ranches in the world!! Bet you’d forgotten that our Dadanawa Ranch had pipped the King Ranch in Texas to earn us bragging rights as to whose cowboys had to roam furthest to rustle up their cattle!! So, the next time you encounter those Texas ranch hands – now reduced to being roustabouts bringing up our oil for Exxon – swaggering around in their Black, duty-free SUVs, let them know they’re number two when it comes to the real cowboy life. We still have a CATTLE TRAIL –cencedely much improved – to traverse to get to our rodeo, while they got paved highways!! What wimps!!
Our orifinal cattle trail is historic dear readers – and your Eyewitness is pretty sure it’s nostalgia for those good, rough and ready days that prevented us from completing the Linden-Lethem paved highway earlier!! We don’t wanna become soft and namby pamby like these modern Texans!! It took a lot of guts for old man HPC Melville – the Scottish owner of Dadanawa Ranch – to carve out that 120-mile Trail during WWI when supplies to Georgetown from Europe and elsewhere got disrupted. Imagine taking hundreds of heads of cattle across swamps, jungles and rivers from assembly point at Annai to the Yawakuri Savannah up the Berbice River. And thence by pontoon to the coast!!
The Yanks had also laid railroads to their Chicago stockyards: they just couldn’t take the heat so they scampered from the camp-fire!! Anyhow, back to our Rupununi Rodeo. From what your Eyewitness could see…we still have some real dyed in the wool cowboys – Vaqueros they’re called – who put on quite a show for us visiting coastlanders. They lapped up the manly art of wrestling cattle to the ground and spitting out their tobacco chaw!! Better than sticking Bulls with swords while prancing around – as the Spaniards do – ain’t it??
But whether we like it or not…the Rupununi has changed – and that change is gonna accelerate. The administration is pouring in a lot of money to get agriculture finally self-sustaining – and capable of not only feeding the Region, but exporting to Brazil and the Coast. Our vaqueros might just have to become rice and soya farmers!! So unfortunately, with the cattle trail to Lethem finally being paved – another 100km was recently completed! – and we’ll just have to do like the Texans and tool down to the Rodeo next year in OUR SUVs!!
How demeaning!!

… Monday
Your Eyewitness doesn’t know about you, dear reader, but for him in his idyllic childhood, the best part of Easter was the annual trek to the sea wall arranged by his mother for her brood. He and his brothers – not sisters! – would’ve spent all week making their kites from scratch. That was before that plastic abomination imported from China!! They created the “frame” from “pointer sticks” filched from their mother’s broom! Then came the trek to the “gamma” trees where they’d eat as much of the sticky fruits as they would bring home!
The” kite paper” was purchased with coins secreted at great sacrifice and now splurged to complete the colourful kites. But if the truth be told, even more than the sight of his kite hovering in space against the pale blue skies, it was the snacks that his mother had prepared that he enjoyed.
Somehow the egg-balls, bara and phulowrie – with the obligatory “sour” – tasted so much delectable on this day. Yeah…Easter was “Happy”!

…in Middle East
Rather than flying kites over the skies that Jesus would’ve ascended into two thousand years ago, fighter jets and drones are bombing Iran back into the Stone Age. Looks like His message of love fell on barren soil.