Highlight the human factor of the disaster at Iron Point

By Clement J Rohee

Following the MV Barima disaster at the treacherous confluence off the Essequibo Coast and the Atlantic Ocean, many moving and touching videos have been shared on social media platforms. Let me state from the outset that I view this tragedy from a human-interest perspective; all things being equal, it is the human factor that is primordial.
Amongst the many videos posted on social media, there was one particular video that attracted my attention. It was an emotional and very touching video showing a mother weeping uncontrollably for her child. In between tears, the woman managed to say that she had just bought some new clothes for her daughter, but now because of the tragedy she will not be able to wear them.
The woman was emotionally upset and, justifiably so. In the video, someone appeared to be consoling her in the midst of her grief and the motherly anger she was expressing because she had lost her child. It is a loss she is struggling to cope with and which she cannot reverse nor change. But it was not just this one mother; there are others. In one particular case, there is a mother who lost seven children in that tragedy.
The MV Barima tragedy was a tragedy of a different kind. It was not one that left persons lying dead on the road, where blood poured from their head and torso, or where their skin was shredded and charred, with splinters of bones covered with dirt.
In this tragedy, people screamed for help while deep in the treacherous water up to their necks; many probably woke up in a state of shock and panic. Others must have died by asphyxiation, some by drowning in their sleep while the ill-fated vessel carrying the dead sank to the bottom of the ocean.
The mournful voices, the incessant weeping of affected families and friends in the current situation where parents, wives, husbands and children weep for the dead, hope for the missing and console survivors – it is the pain a grieving nation must face and lower its head with a sense of duty, empathy and thoughtfulness.
The question that will prove hard to sink in is how to process one’s loss and by what means can the transition be made from bereavement or from survival – how to be strong in the wake of this tragedy to make lives lost live – and to make their deaths count.
The answers to these questions should be viewed through the prism of service and acts of kindness aimed at empowering the survivor and the bereaved to surmount rather than to be heavily burdened; to find ways to frame their misfortune in a more personally understandable way that serves to protect them from being overwhelmed by trauma, isolation and indifference because of their frightening and painful experience.
There may be survivors who, perhaps, may have nightmares about the horrific experience, while there may be others who, when they wake up every morning, they know that they are here and not there where the death boat lay. Then comes the pain were they ever to travel that ill-fated route again to pass by that painfully dark and ugly place where the boat went down, drowning many and conjuring up memories of those lost at sea, thus compounding their daily suffering.
At another level lies the challenge of fulfilling public commitments made at an individual, community, sectoral and societal level; overcoming institutional lethargy; and the search for scapegoats and to lash out at them or to invent escapist solutions.
Sections of the media should allow parents, mothers and entire families to grieve and weep privately. Their grief and sorrow, as well as individual stories by survivors, should not be transformed into a public spectacle. Nor should publicising their stories compound their trauma. And they should never get weary of sections of the media who turn their pain into breaking news and headline embellishments.
The greatest fear of the bereaved is that their loved ones will be forgotten. To prevent the slow erasure and closure of their unfinished goals that their premature deaths prohibited, the nation is duty-bound to pay homage and respect and to fulfil whatever may have been their goals and aspirations as well as their wishes for improvement in the lives of every Guyanese man, woman and child.