I am British born, with Trinidadian and Guyanese parents. I've had a very similar experience, not just in tech but throughout all areas of my life. I look Indian, but culturally it's very different.

Everyone always (perhaps South Asians more commonly) asks where I'm from. I say I'm British. They ask "no, really". I say Trinidadian and Guyanese heritage. They say "you look like you are from India, your family must be from India". It does get a bit tiresome.

The only time it actually _really_ annoys me is when I have to fill out forms with ethnicity. There is never Asian-Caribbean, but always Black-Caribbean, so I always feel that I am never being represented.

Indian here. I've never fit in any of the traditional Indian cliques. Such a blessing! At the end of the day, you're going to lose your individuality over the group or sub-group you're identifying with. And you're going to be pulled into their politics and drama. Read Naval's thoughts on the importance of solitude and dis-identification with any group, in order to be able to become the individual you are meant to be. And thank your stars that none of the traditional Indian cliques wants you.

Well hello, fellow Guyanese in tech. My grandmother got the Cacique crown of honor (second highest civilian honor in the country) https://guyanachronicle.com/2017/02/05/outstanding-doctor-en...

I remember being lectured that I was latino since Guyana is in latin america and I had to explain that, nah.

Born Guyanese, but only lived there until I was 3, then we moved to St. Lucia. Have lots of memories from visiting over summers and Christmas multiple times when I was a kid.

Mostly consider myself Lucian and I feel like I've assimilated into the American tech population. My history now is just a interesting fun fact. Don't meet too many people from the Caribbean in general in tech circles, so it's always fun to get a reminder that they're out there.

As a die hard cricket fan I am pretty well aware of the talented Guyanese cricketers, most notably Shivnarine Chanderpaul. I think most of your Indian colleagues likely follow cricket so that could be a great way to start bonding with them. Of course, if you don't follow cricket then that's a useless advice!

Beyond this, I would suggest learning a little bit about the common topics we "Desi" people talk about at work. In the US most of us will talk about local issues way more than anything happening back in India. This is partly because India is quite siloed. So there is a good chance that people are talking about elections these days.

Btw language barriers play a huge role. I understand Spanish and Portuguese better than I understand many Indian languages. In many cases, I can't even figure out which language people are speaking. (As an aside, it is possible that some of your colleagues are not speaking Hindi but some other language altogether.) None of my Indian colleagues in my university speak my native language. Many of them don't speak Hindi. So we communicate only in English.

My dad's side of the family is indo-guyanese (and he was specifically in tech for his whole career). It's interesting, they've (and I, to a lesser extent) reported something similar, where every once in a great while people from India will recognize our last name and then slowly realize we don't have much in common culturally. Our food is "caribbean-indian" for instance (apparently Trinidad has something similar), it's kind of different than what you'd get from in a regular Indian restaurant.

The comment the author made about the caste system not coming to Guyana tracks too, my aunt has encountered people making quips about it at work every once in a blue moon.

I have met two other Guyanese people in the US outside of friends of my family. One of them was actually someone I was friends with in Guyana. Purely by coincidence we went to the same US high school and came across each other in a hallway. The other had moved here when he was about 2 years old.

Shouldn't be surprised. It's a country the size of England with the population of a large neighborhood in Brooklyn.

As an American of South Asian ancestry, I have always been intrigued by other South Asian diaspora communities like the ones in Guyana, Trinidad and South Africa. I wonder if the cultural evolution of those South Asian communities can be used to forecast how Indian American culture will evolve. One key difference of course is that immigration from India to the US is ongoing while it stopped in Guyana for the most part and may have led to more cultural evolution.

I had a Guyanese coworker at my last company. I initially thought she was Indian based on her name and looks. Her background made us have a lot to talk about and we were good friends.

Check out this tech podcast, https://securityconversations.com

Might be tiring if South Asians start referring to cricket as one of first points of conversation as well as many average Indians are still unaware of the broader history

You have to kind of push your way into circles if you want to make friends at work. Cliquishness is kind of natural, but it can be overcome with a little Type A extrovertedness

My wife is Guyanese, is that close enough?

For those wondering, these figures are quoted in the Guyanese dollar, not the U.S. dollar.

1 Guyanese dollar equals 0.0048 USD.

Unsustainable. Things will probably change after enough Guyanese find out.

> creole English (broken English)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyanese_Creole

Side note: creoles are accepted as version of French/English etc. that evolved on a different timeline while getting heavy influences from the local languages. For a while it was common to call them "broken" or "bastardized" [0], in language circles that's pretty much a thing of the past I'd say. Same way we don't call French broken Latin.

[0] https://guyanachronicle.com/2013/10/13/the-rich-cultural-exp...

The map of Guyana at the top of this article listed a location called Kamuda Village, and I thought that sounded interesting, so I checked it out on Google Search and Google Maps.

There's basically nothing about it on the English Internet. A point exists on Google Maps and some auto-generated SEO spam pages exist probably for that reason. There are no photos of the location, the terrain view just shows trees. No roads nearby. It's a few hundred meters from the marginally better documented Kukui River. The Internet has a video of some kids at another part of this river who take a raft across it every day to get to school.

It looks like there are lots of places in Guyana like this. Inhabited but undocumented, at least on the public Internet. It's fascinating to me that in an era where you just assume everything is online, there's so much of the world that still isn't.

> There’s also a huge Dutch history

I thought Suriname was the Dutch Guyana

> Glad they found oil and now have insane GDP growth.

Guyana has weak political institutions and high corruption & tribalism. It’s more likely to become a poor resource-cursed nation than a successful one.

I truly hope this isn’t the case, but if history teaches us a lesson..

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse

It’s unfortunately not that simple for poor countries to benefit from resources

What method do you use to send articles like this to your kindle?

One additional bit of context on the Indian indentured labour is that crossing the seas was considered a great taboo among Hindus, leading to a loss of your "caste" because you had lost contact with the holy land. So only the very desperate and destitute were willing to take this deal. Or the adventurous.

The British Cellular Jail on the Andaman Islands were considered double jeopardy because of this as well.

> Guyana speaks English.

The article says “My major historical sources include a 1992 US Military-commissioned study of Guyana and Belize. No, I have no idea why they lumped those two countries together”

This seems to be the connection: only mainland countries south of USA primarily English speaking. (Of course both related to British colonialism)

> for some reason, Indians were never officially called "slaves" by the British

An indentured worker and a slave are not the same thing. While one would prefer to be neither of those things, generally the former voluntarily entered into the arrangement (or in lieu of prison), were bound for a fixed term, weren't considered property, and had at least some legal recourse. Were some indentured workers de-facto slaves? Almost certainly. That doesn't mean they were the same thing though.

Its neighbor, French Guyana is French territory. Thanks to that, Brazil is the country with the largest border to France.

> In fact Guyanese and Belizeans are able to pick and choose what to indicate on forms regarding their ethnicity, as it suits them.

I thought everyone could do this

> for some reason, Indians were never officially called "slaves" by the British

The same goes for chinese, japanese and filipino "slaves". In official capacity, they may not have been called slaves, but unofficially, they were. There are old portguese books that claimed japanese made the best slaves. And there was a british viceroy who claimed indians made the best slaves.

> Guyanese are often considered "Hispanic" in the U.S.

Maybe in official documents but certainly not in everyday life. Guyanese are considered and treated like indians or 'hindus' and they themselves view themselves as indians, not hispanic.

>for some reason, Indians were never officially called "slaves" by the British

I suppose it's because they weren't. It's sort of fashionable to compare hard conditions to slavery in many fields, but back in those times the difference would be obvious.

Indentured labour was done by contract for a fixed period, and they were paid. For people who believe that there was workers who got on the ships through their own agency this is important. This undoubtedly happened along with those who were compelled or deceived.

Frankly, I think the reason that it is not more often referred to as slavery is because it wasn’t officially referred to as such contemporaneously. But there is legitimate debate around the differences between Indian indentured servitude and slavery.

> - Yes, there are countries in "Latin" America that speak English.

Which one?

When you say good weather, where would you place Guyana in this map? https://xkcd.com/1916/

> - Yes, there are countries in "Latin" America that speak English. There are also countries that mainly speak French.

"Latin America" has multiple definitions. Most of those definitions do exclude English-speaking Belize and Guyana (and Dutch-speaking Suriname).

> Venezuela was invading Guyana

Venezuela was threatening to invade Guyana*

> What an unexpectedly spellbinding historical read.

Spellbinding ? More like propaganda. Historical ? "When the first spanish settler".

One can tell the nationality of the author from those.

In this context, "persuasion" is an idiom just means something like "background" "has this attribute".

It doesn't have anything to do with the typical meaning of "persuade" because English is weird.

> What "persuasion" means in this context?

"Of the ... persuasion" is a slightly fancy way of saying "who are ..."

Guyana: South America

French Guiana: South America

Guinea: Africa

Guinea-Bissau: Africa

Equatorial Guinea: Africa

Papua New Guinea: Asia

Bonus fun fact: the guinea pig is from Peru and has no known connection to any of these.

At one time, partnered with North Korea!

https://apjjf.org/2015/13/4/Moe-Taylor/4258

> Mass Games in North Korea.. are without comparison the largest choreographed performance in the world.. There are three central components.. gymnastics, music, and the panoramic backdrop.. The backdrop is created through tens of thousands of children aligned in one side of the stadium seats holding books of illustrated cards positioned contiguously with each other to give the illusion of an imperforate surface; by changing the pages of the book in precisely coordinated unison following the signals of a conductor, the backdrop image is transformed throughout the performance.

Guinea, Guyana, and Ghana… are hard to keep straight. 2/3 in Africa. Add French, New, and Papua combos and no wonder.

Just like Andorra - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3q_iqrvnC_4

> If you ask a random American about Guyana, they won’t know what it is. If they’ve heard of it, they will probably think it’s in Africa (happened to me 3X times), and if they know just a little bit more about it, they know it’s the home of Jonestown.

My Minnesota-born brother in law: "You're from Africa, right?"

"No, Guyana, not Ghana."

"Pardon my ignorance, but where is that exactly?" :-)

Considering that the author is doing a blog series on visiting some of the more out-of-the-way places, I spent most of the piece wondering when he'd stop talking about the history and actually go on about the things he saw.

When that list amounts to "I booked it to the next country because I exhausted everything worth doing in a day", coming from someone who tries hard to do interesting stuff well off the beaten path... it really sounds like the only reason to go to that country is to check it off the list of the countries to visit. Yikes.

Lots of beautiful spots to see in the interior, Kaiteur is the highest single drop waterfall in the world. Baganara Island is a good vacation spot. Don't believe everything you read on the internet.

I follow a few popular travellers on YouTube and they had almost identical experiences.

Here's hoping their new oil wealth will improve their infrastructure and reduce crime.

1989, poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, https://www.stabroeknews.com/2016/12/02/features/30-years-of...

That is surprising - considering how close they are. I've always ended up flying out of New York or Toronto, at what I'd consider reasonable prices. I suspect it's because of the sizable expat/2nd/3rd gen population in the northeast.

Struck black gold, complete with neighbour envy

They found tons of oil

Exxon & Chevron.

https://www.guyanastandard.com/2023/10/23/guyana-to-see-new-...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/hess-guyanas-secret-...

For some reason the current leader of Guyana (who has a muslim name) hangs out a lot with India's Modi (who is an open islamophobe). A strange set of bedfellows.

Theory is that 1) Guyana needs to wage war with Venezuela over oil-rich disputed territory [1], and 2) Guyana wants to build a lot of infrastructure. Might be opportunities there.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guyana%E2%80%93Venezuela_terri...

Real estate.

I know people in Guyana doing real estate who may have opportunities. Email in my profile if you are interested.