Rhon­dor Dowlat

From a staff of eight, the Ch­aguara­mas Mil­i­tary and Avi­a­tion Mu­se­um has been forced to re­duce its com­ple­ment to just three as they can­not af­ford to pay salaries and cov­er oth­er ex­pens­es, be­cause they are yet to re­ceive their an­nu­al sub­ven­tion cheque of $300,000.

Mu­se­um pres­i­dent Lin­da Kelshall ex­plained that the mu­se­um de­pend­ed on the cheque as it was help­ful in meet­ing some of the month­ly ex­pens­es ex­am­ple salaries and util­i­ty bills—elec­tric­i­ty and wa­ter—which amount­ed to an av­er­age of $18,000 every three months.

Vice pres­i­dent Bri­an Mitchell added that about four weeks ago they re­ceived a call from the Min­istry of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Cul­ture and the Arts that the cheque was ready but added that for “some strange rea­son it is not be­ing dis­bursed.”

The last that was heard of the cheque, ac­cord­ing to Kelshall, was that “it was giv­en to some­one else.”

“We were get­ting it all the time but I don’t know what hap­pened this time around. Al­most every day my vice pres­i­dent keeps go­ing to check and noth­ing.

“We spend al­most $1 mil­lion every year and we de­pend on the sub­ven­tion to help out. The rest we get through do­na­tions from mem­bers and busi­ness peo­ple,” Kelshall said.

Mitchell said they sub­mit­ted every doc­u­ment re­quest­ed in­clud­ing au­dit­ed state­ments.

“We have been very ac­count­able and trans­par­ent. Any doc­u­ment re­quest­ed we al­ways sub­mit it,” Mitchell said.

He added that they have made at­tempts to be ex­empt­ed from pay­ing com­mer­cial rates for pub­lic util­i­ties by send­ing let­ters to the re­spec­tive au­thor­i­ties, how­ev­er, they have not even re­ceived an ac­knowl­edge­ment.

“We have been try­ing but we feel as though maybe his­to­ry and the im­por­tance of preser­va­tion is maybe not im­por­tant enough and this is what is fail­ing us.

“Every year, we have an av­er­age of 5,000 peo­ple pass­ing through in­clud­ing uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents do­ing re­search. This is a very im­por­tant mu­se­um and it ought to be recog­nised,” Mitchell said.

When con­tact­ed, a min­istry of­fi­cial said that checks would have to be made with re­gards to the mu­se­um’s sub­ven­tion cheque.

“I am not sure what went wrong if any­thing at all but I know that cheques have been pre­pared and some al­ready have been re­ceived by the re­spec­tive or­gan­i­sa­tions. I am sure if it is there it will be giv­en to them,” the of­fi­cial said.

Yes­ter­day, on the one-year death an­niver­sary of her hus­band, founder of the mu­se­um and his­to­ri­an, Kelshall re­vealed a bust of the late Lieu­tenant Com­man­der Gay­lord Kelshall.

The con­crete bust took Kelshall two days to build with­out a mould and with her bare “God-gift­ed” hands and three days to paint.

She de­scribed it as a very emo­tion­al jour­ney for her.

“My hus­band al­ways want­ed me to build a bust af­ter he died and I de­cid­ed to do this for his first year death an­niver­sary. I cried some times while do­ing it but the best thing about it was that I nev­er had to look at any phys­i­cal pho­to­graph of him. I looked at his im­age from my head and my heart and to­day it is just mind blow­ing.”

When she un­veiled the bust, a high­ly emo­tion­al Kelshall looked at it and said, “Gay­lord…I have brought you back to your mu­se­um.”

Ef­forts to reach Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Cul­ture and the Arts Dr Nyan Gads­by-Dol­ly yes­ter­day for com­ment proved fu­tile as calls to her phone went unan­swered.