I was born and raised in the relatively small and insignificant country of Guyana, South America. Many people around the world don’t even know that Guyana exists. We’re not the richest or most-talked about country in the world. But today, I learned that there is something very special about Guyana.
During the Easter Holiday – like about three weeks before the actual Easter Holiday, Guyanese would start flying kites to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus into heaven. And on Easter Sunday and Monday, the people would really pour out in their numbers in all open spaces: beaches, savannas, parks….This is a Guyanese tradition, and I thought it was also a common tradition around the world. I was wrong.
I’m presently working on a language course aimed at teaching English to Brazilians. In one of my lessons, I wrote about kite flying. I wrote about how people fly kites during the Easter Holidays to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus into His heavenly abode.
A friend of mine, Simon Warner, who happens to be a Jehovah’s Witness from the UK, was helping me to proofread the book. He pointed out quite a few errors and anomalies in some of my stories, but he also told me something interesting: he had only heard of kite flying for Jesus in Guyana – no other part of the world.
I thought he was joking or something. Only Guyana? “Then we must be truly blessed,” I mused.
I really thought Simon was wrong and that kite flying is a world-wide practice to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus. So I did some research online and it turns out that Simon was, once again, right.
I didn’t turn up one piece of evidence from my online research which shows that kite flying for Jesus is being done anywhere else in the world. I’ve read that it was once used for military purposes, for sports, etc and etc, but nowhere was it mentioned as a tradition to mark the resurrection of Jesus. So if kite flying for Jesus is not from the UK, which is the country that colonized and Christianized Guyana, then where is it from? Is it purely Guyanese? And which smart Guyanese blessed Guyana with that tradition? I guess we’ll never know!
