Holding…

…still

Your Eyewitness lives and learns!! Two hundred years ago, a Frenchman pointed a camera out of his window and changed the world!! Nicéphore Niépce’s “View from the Window at Le Gras” – dated to 1826 – is the oldest surviving camera photograph. It shows buildings and rooftops – rather than anything particularly exciting. Humanity’s great photographic adventure began, reassuringly, with somebody photographing the view from home!!
Think about this – before photography, having your likeness preserved usually required an artist, money, and a heck of a lotta patience!! Posterity favoured folks who could afford to sit around looking important – so photography opened the family album to the rest of us!! Ordinary shmoes acquired something once reserved for the privileged – a face that could outlive them!!
And what faces they left! Those stiff family portraits – with everyone looking as though smiling might spoil the photograph – became household treasures!! In Guyanese homes, a framed wedding picture or a fading portrait could preside over the front room for decades!! Generations grew up beneath the gaze of an ancestor who clearly disapproved of the world!!
But photography gave our migration a human face, too, didn’t it?? A picture arriving from “outside” showed the baby had grown, the son had married, or the daughter was standing beside SNOW!! Relatives inspected the background almost as carefully as the person – was that REALLY his house? And who was the woman next to him?!! The camera also enlarged our world by making places most folks would never visit become visible!!
Photographs also gave history details that official accounts often overlooked – an old street photograph preserves Georgetown’s shop signs, the clothes, the transport, and the people passing through an ordinary afternoon!! The photographer may’ve intended to capture Big Market – a century later, we’re peering at the fellow standing in front!!
Then came the domestic suspense of the film camera. You took your pictures, handed over the roll, and waited to discover whether you had recorded a holiday or 24 variations of your thumb!! Now, the smartphone’s made almost everyone a photographer – while demanding that everything’s gotta be documented. At a birthday party, the cake waits, the candles burn down and somebody shouts, “One more!” – as especially our meals have become models!!
Yet beneath all this cheerful excess lies photography’s extraordinary gift – it lets us return to a face, a place, a moment, making a blurred snapshot of someone we loved more valued than the finest picture in a gallery! The camera can’t keep people with us – but it can preserve the way they stood in a doorway, held a child, or laughed before anyone told us to pose!!
Two hundred years on, that remains a small miracle!!

…development banner
For many ordinary Guyanese, starting a business has meant confronting a familiar puzzle – to borrow the money needed to get ahead, you’ve gotta first prove you’re already comfortably ahead!! Bring collateral, bring financial statements, and bring this document, and that document!! And by the time you finish bringing things, the business idea might qualify for a pension!!
So, the Government deserves kudos for opening a more promising door through the Guyana Development Bank – which offers eligible small and medium-sized businesses loans of up to GY$3 million, without interest or collateral, across all 10 Regions!! We’ve got no shortage of folks with “growable” business opportunities – there’s the black-pudding vendor whose orders have outgrown her kitchen; the mechanic who needs equipment to establish his own workshop; the farmer who could earn more by processing what he grows; and the young graduate with a clever business idea but no property to pledge!!
Now the interest-free loans up to $3M and business coaching can put them to work and spread the wealth!!

… black assets
From our own history, we know about CIA agents being funded to work undercover. But your Eyewitness didn’t realise the scale of the funding.
One agent admits stealing US$200M – including $40M in gold bars found in home!!