Returning to Guyana After 24 Years: An Insider Homecoming

Returning to Guyana after twenty-four years is not a visit, it is a reckoning with the country you carried and the one that kept moving without you.

Coming home after twenty-four years is not a feeling. It is a recalibration.

The heat hits first, not the temperature, but the density of it, the way the air at Cheddi Jagan International Airport (CJIA) in Timehri folds itself around you as if it remembers something you forgot. The second thing is the light. Georgetown light is not soft. It is not polite. It arrives with intention, bouncing off glass towers that did not exist when you left and wooden fretwork that somehow still does.

You stand there, suitcase in hand, and realise the country you carried in memory is not the country you have stepped into. Both are true. Both are yours.

What Changed While You Were Gone

The skyline is the first disorientation.

The classic Kingston Marriott on the point. The sleek AC Marriott at Ogle. The Four Points rising out of the red dirt along the new highway. Glass and concrete towers rewriting a city. A city that once moved at the pace of bicycles now hums with the logic of an oil economy, cranes, concrete, glass, ambition.

The Georgetown you left was horizontal.

The Georgetown you returned to is vertical.

You drive past places you once knew by instinct and now recognise only by coordinates. The roads are wider. The cars are plenty and newer. The city is louder. The pace is different. The confidence is different. The stakes are different.

You left a city that was surviving.

You returned to a city that is becoming.

What Has Not Changed at All

Then the counterpoint arrives.

The seawall still smells like salt and memory.

The wooden houses still lean into the breeze the way they always have.

The voices still carry the same cadence, a rhythm you didn’t realise your body remembered until you heard it again.

Someone calls you “aunty” or “uncle” even though they do not know your name.

A vendor hands you a snow cone and refuses your extra dollar.

A stranger tells you “Welcome home” with a sincerity that disarms you.

The city has changed.

The people have not.

The Country You Carried vs. the Country That Kept Moving

Leaving is one kind of story.

Returning is another.

You realise quickly that the Guyana you carried, the one preserved in memory, in food, in the way you pronounce certain words is a version that stayed still because you did. The real country kept moving. It grew, faltered, rebuilt, expanded, argued with itself, reinvented itself, and did not wait for you to return.

You do not come back to the country you left.

You come back to the country that survived without you.

There is grief in that, there is relief in that and there is truth in that.

“You do not come back to the country you left. You come back to the country that survived without you.”

Three Moments That Stayed

1.  The First Bite

Metemgee, cassava pone, white pudding, the flavours are the same, but your reaction is not.

You taste the years, you taste the distance and you taste the part of yourself you left behind.

2.  The First Morning Light

Sunlight through wooden jalousies.

A soundscape of birds, dogs, distant traffic, and someone sweeping a yard.

You realise you have not woken up to this in decades, yet your body recognises it instantly.

3.  The First Walk on the Seawall

The Atlantic is still brown and restless.

The breeze is still the city’s oldest form of air-conditioning.

You stand there and understand, without drama, that you are both visitor and native.

Both insider and outsider.

Both returned and still returning.

What You Saw That You Didn’t Expect

You came home expecting memory. And you found momentum.

◆  Agri‑tourism farms blooming where sugarcane fields used to stand.

◆  A luxury boom reshaping the skyline.

◆  Boutique heritage houses in polished hardwood, and a skyline rising in concrete and glass.

◆  A food renaissance that treats Indigenous ingredients as architecture, not garnish.

◆  Essequibo weekends that feel like a reset button.

◆  A sense of forward motion everywhere you look.

You realise Guyana is not waiting to be discovered.

It is deciding what it wants to become.

What It Means to Belong After Leaving

Belonging is no longer a place.

It is a negotiation.

You belong to the Guyana you left, the Guyana you returned to and you belong to the version of yourself that exists in the space between them.

You are not fully home and you are not fully away. You are something in between and that in-between is its own kind of truth.

Coming home did not answer every question.

It answered the one that mattered.

You did not return to the Guyana you left.

You returned to the Guyana that waited.