Invoking…

…a requiem for the Barima

Your Eyewitness is still in despair over the capsizing of the MV Barima. Today he offers this requiem for the victims of the Barima capsizing. “The ocean does not choose its victims. It receives them with the same indifferent embrace it has offered for centuries – to fishermen and traders, children and elders, dreamers and labourers. It asks only that those who venture upon it do so with respect, preparation, and care. This time, the ocean was asked to bear a burden that others had neglected.
The names of those lost aboard the MV Barima now drift like echoes across the water. Mothers who expected to return home by morning. Fathers carrying provisions. Young folks planning tomorrow. Elders who had crossed these waters countless times before, believing experience itself was protection enough. None imagined that an ordinary voyage would become their final passage.
Your Eyewitness mourns them first – not as statistics, not as passengers, but as lives interrupted. Empty chairs now stand in homes from Mabaruma to Georgetown. There are children waiting for footsteps that will never sound upon the veranda again. There are families listening for voices silenced beneath the tide. There are communities discovering that grief travels faster than any vessel. And yet mourning alone would betray them.
For death by storm is tragedy. Death by fate is sorrow. But death made possible by neglect is something altogether different. It carries the bitter taste of preventability. A vessel is more than steel and timber. It is a covenant between those entrusted with its operation and those who place their lives within it. Every inspection deferred, every repair postponed, every warning ignored weakens that covenant until, one terrible day, it breaks.
When maintenance becomes an afterthought, rust becomes a sentence. When regulations become paperwork rather than principle, certificates become little more than folded paper. And when accountability sleeps, innocent people inherit the consequences. The ocean should never become the final auditor of human negligence.
The waters of the northwest have always been both a highway and a lifeline. They connect villages that roads cannot reach. They carry teachers to classrooms, patients to hospitals, merchants to markets, and families to one another. Those who board these vessels do not gamble with life; they trust that someone has already done the work to keep them safe.
That trust is sacred. Today it lies broken alongside the wreckage of the Barima. So let this requiem be more than lamentation. Let it be an indictment of complacency. Let every official responsible for maritime safety hear in the silence left by these deaths a summons to act. Let every operator understand that maintenance is not a cost to be minimised but a promise to be honoured. Let every inspector remember that a signature may one day be weighed against a human life.
No inquiry can restore those who have been lost. No report can return a parent’s embrace or a child’s laughter. But an honest reckoning may yet spare another family from standing on a riverbank searching the water for someone who should have come home.
May those who perished find the peace that eluded them in their final moments. May those who loved them find strength enough to endure the unbearable. And may the memory of the MV Barima become more than another chapter in Guyana’s catalogue of avoidable disasters. Let it become the moment when a nation resolved that no citizen would again be asked to entrust their life to a vessel weakened by neglect and sustained by hope alone.
The ocean will continue to ebb and flow tomorrow, as it always has. The question is whether we have learned that remembrance without responsibility is merely another form of forgetting.”

…promises
Last December when the US multi-million dollar Bell 429 and Bell 407 helicopters arrived, the head honcho promised they “strengthened Guyana’s ability to respond rapidly to emergencies, provided access to remote hinterland and riverain communities, and supported disaster response, medical evacuation, search and rescue, and other civil operations.”
Where were they for the Barima??