Former members of the Guyana National Service (GNS) had their say yesterday before the Veterans Commission of Inquiry (COI).During the engagement at the GNS Club on Carifesta Avenue,Cheap NFL Jerseys China, it was Gerald MichaelEx-GNS officials at the COI hearings yesterday.Pereira, a Fifth intake pioneer of Papaya and now Executive Member of the Ex-GNS Association, who made the call for a monument to be erected on the grounds at Carifesta Avenue in honour of those persons who would have died whilst serving within the GNS.“It is time and it is very necessary,” Pereira said, noting that similar monuments have been erected to honour other joint services members.“The police have a monument where the families of the deceased can go every year and lay wreaths; we have none,” Pereira noted.He said that the monument will not only honour those who died, like cadets from the Jaguar Centre that lost their lives in the New River Triangle area, but it will also replace an earlier one that was erected at GNS centre in Papaya in the Barima-Waini, Region One to honour the lives lost there.Pereira recalled that on a day of sports at the Region One Centre, a tree fell and one of the branches took the lives of nine persons.He recalled that a monument was erected thereafter in the form of a tree trunk with the names,Cheap Wholesale NFL Jerseys, of the personnel who lost their lives. Today, that monument is “long gone,” Pereira said, “desecrated” because the “area is being mined now.It was also Pereira who made the call on behalf of the Ex-GNS Association for housing and land for its members noting that Government have granted similar concessions to the nurses, the teachers,China Jerseys NFL Wholesale, the police and the soldiers.He observed that whilst there is a Joint Service housing scheme in Lamaha Springs that has “spots for few National Service members in there, there are still so many members outside of that do not have a home of their own”.“I am quite certain that if you make land available in an affordable manner that they would jump at the opportunity to own something of their own,” Pereira told the COI.Meanwhile, on the issue of the preservation of the GNS training centre at Kimbia on the Berbice River, Pereira said that he took 11 people to the location in May 2015 and was shocked at what was left of the location.“It was a sad sight…there is nothing left of Kimbia; the buildings are gone,” Pereira said. He added, “It is a disgrace to know that we had cotton there, we had blackeye, all of these products coming out of there and nothing is left.”According to Pereira, the Ex-GNS Association was recently informed that the lands at Kimbia were given out to some private company to do soya planting.He suggested that part of the lands now be returned to them, “so we can do something that people can remember”.There was also calls for the reintroduction of the GNS,Cheap Jerseys, perhaps, excluding the military aspect of it, and for the use of Kimbia as the space to put a large training centre for all the skills training schools in Guyana.The ex-GNS members also aired concerns over the use of the GNS Sports Club.They explained that they are not getting to properly use the facility built by them. According to the former ranks, the building was constructed through self-help,Cheap Jerseys From China, with each member donating one month’s salary.Today, they complained that to get to use the building, if they put in a late application to book the building then they do not have a meeting place.Further if they do book the building and get it, they are likely at the bottom flat while the top is rented for other events.Launched in 1974, the GNS had its origins in an attempt to solve the problem of youth unemployment in the mid-1960s. Before its controversial dismantling in 2000,Authentic Jerseys Wholesale, over 20,000 youths were trained in various para-military and life skills.The Veterans Commission of Inquiry was set up by President David Granger and tasked with examining the conditions and circumstances facing veterans of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF), the Guyana People’s Militia and GNS. The COI which formally commenced interviews on August 31st, is scheduled to conclude this month.