Jul 26, 2026 Features / Columnists, News

(Kaieteur News) – There is a woman in Guyana who has lost seven children on the ill-fated MV Barima vessel. A family of 17 people began the journey, only 7 survived. I have tried all week to find words large enough for those two sentences. I was unsuccessful. There comes a point when statistics fail us. They cannot capture the silence of an empty home, the unanswered phone calls, the untouched schoolbooks, the birthday that will never be celebrated, or the unbearable task of explaining to a parent why the future they imagined disappeared beneath the water.

A nation is grieving. The survivors are grieving. The families are grieving. The children who survived will carry memories no child should ever have to carry. Thousands who never stepped aboard the MV Barima have also been traumatised because every Guyanese can see themselves, their parents, their children, or their neighbours in this tragedy. This cannot become another news cycle. It cannot become another commission, another report, another promise, followed by a quiet return to business as usual.