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John W. Kennedy, associate news editor, recently traveled to Guyana, which relief experts fear might become another Haiti with chronic problems that could mushroom into crises.

The smells of poverty in Georgetown, Guyana, on the Atlantic coast of South America, waft 25 miles out of town to the international airport, where we arrive around midnight on a steamy Wednesday. The odor of sewage and rubbish is a constant companion on the bus ride from the airport into Georgetown.

Oddly enough, apparently not all businesses are failing to thrive in Guyana. The most modern-looking building visible on the route to Guyana's capital city is a large brewery.

Guyana's unfortunate claim to international notoriety came as a result of the horrific mass suicide-execution led by cultist Jim Jones in November 1978. In all, 911 died at the People's Temple's remote jungle site. Today, Guyana and its people are among the forgotten working poor of the world: not poor enough to draw the international news media as in Haiti, Bosnia, or Rwanda, and not resourceful enough to pull their country up by its own bootstraps.

Thirty years ago, civil war between blacks and East Indians put Guyana on the edge of economic collapse. Little has been accomplished to maintain the country's infrastructure since England granted the former colony independence in 1966.

For its first quarter-century, independent Guyana, the size of the state of Idaho, was governed according to Marxist economics, with disastrous results. In recent years, the transition to a free market has been rocky at best. Guyana rivals Haiti as the poorest country in the Western hemisphere. Public streets are piled high with garbage. The government does not have enough money to pay sanitation workers or to fix garbage trucks. Unemployment remains around 30 percent. Educated Guyanese frequently emigrate to more prosperous regions of the Americas.

As a nation, Guyana has all the classic problems of an underdeveloped former colony. Walking the littered streets of Georgetown, a bleak question keeps coming back: Has this entire nation somehow fallen through the cracks?

Many Guyanese seem strangely content to sit in their hot homes all day or to wander the pot-holed streets with nothing to do. The idleness stems not so much from indolence as from hopelessness.

One extended family—a dozen people—lives in adjoining shacks in a residential area. In one dwelling lives Lloyd James, a young black man, and his wife and their two girls, ages 12 and 8. Their one room contains a mattress on the floor and little else. No one has shoes.

James worked in a disco before business declined and he lost his job. "I keep checking, but nothing comes up," he says. The family raises chickens and pigs. Even the animals are gaunt.

Away from the cramped slums of Georgetown, poverty has a different face, but it is still poverty. Near Linden, 37-year-old Maureen Whyte lives in a one-room shack, which has a bed frame without a mattress. Her five children -along with countless houseflies—sleep on the floor.

FILLING THE GAP

Christians have been in Guyana, originally a Dutch possession, since the seventeenth century. During the rule by the Dutch and later the British, Protestant churches grew to become the leading religious group in the country. With independence in 1966 and a Marxist rule, most churches experienced a period of sharp confrontation with the country's government and its official atheism. Today nominalism continues to be a very real challenge to Guyanese evangelicals and to the missions community.

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September 12 1994, Vol. 38, No. 10