As you may be aware, based on the Photo Gallery on this website, Bajan Reporter is in Georgetown for the Caribbean Week in Agriculture soon winding down… Guyana is a huge place and very interesting to visit, will soon be posting quite a few videos on my return to Bim!

One unexpected bonus was to be near Senator Maxine McClean who was liaising with her Guyanese counterpart – Carolyn Rodriguez-Birkett, they were finalising various Memoranda of Understanding between Barbados & Georgetown pertaining to Immigration, Tourism, Agriculture & Education… The Senator looked like an owl as her eyes swelled on realising I was in Guyana too! 😀 This was the same day the decision had been handed down on the Shanique Myrie affair, the Caricom Court of Justice awarded the Jamaican complainant only $40,000 USD of an initial half a million she sought for wrongful search or “finger-rape” as she referred to said incident.

Listen to the Barbadian Senator when I sought her reaction…

Clearly she was peeved at my trying to lay a broadside, but how can one dictate a Press Conference’s path when it is known the world over, anything can happen? I was in actual fact referring to a matter of Immigration & Security and yes, she may have been in a meeting all day, but so was I – and I saw the decision on my Bold 9900, can she not do the same?

Luckily the crowd of (very young) journalists I joined with at the Guyana International Conference Centre, took up the banner and proceeded to follow the trail, to the Senator’s chagrin as you can hear… Then the Guyanese media took an intriguing tangent, they posed Barbados’ decline by 6% in Tourism may be hinged to less Guyanese in the island?

But even though Guyana’s young Cabinet Minister kept quiet for a while, eventually she added in that appeals to refusals have diminished in the last 2 years…

So then does this not mean 3 years ago there justifiable objections of how Barbados Immigration treated Guyanese visitors? But these turks did not let go that easy, and the Barbadian Senator had to disclose some refusals were due to false passports and others for overstaying their visit – yet again she asked if the conference was going to “degenerate” into an Immigration debate? She then indicated some of the other benefits of the new partnership between the two Caricom neighbours…

Minister Rodrigues-Birkett indicated Skype may play a crucial role in allowing both Bajans and Guyanese to share their experiences with each other…

I do believe Barbados’ Foreign Affairs Minister needs to learn how to handle media as was superbly shown by her counterpart from Georgetown – Carolyn Rodriguez-Birkett!