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This sense of the Guyana Dream made a young Chinese man, Cho Kee, abandon a Caribbean-bound China cargo ship that docked in Georgetown in 1937, and made this country his new home. Cho Kee told his son the story one day, at his restaurant at Grove, East Bank Demerara. His son, Malcolm, was a boy attending Central High School. The old man told Malcolm to always love Guyana, because in this land, no one could ever starve to death. He told me his parents had put him on the boat in China because everywhere people were starving, in fact dying of starvation. He had seen many, many Chinese people die because they could not get food. Starvation was a massive problem in China. And his parents boarded him on the cargo boat because they hoped he would find a place where he could get food, Malcolm said. Cho Kee told his son he was entranced when he came on land here and found that if he ate a tomato and threw the seed away, that seed sprouted and grew into a plant growing many more tomato. To him, it was a miracle. Cho Kee chose to stay here and made this country his home. Today, the Cho-Kee clan makes a vibrant living in North America, with grands and great-grands world class professionals, as doctors, dentists, architects, business owners. Cho Kee came off the boat and saw the Guyana Dream, and he designed a future where his children would never starve. He charted a well-lived life, passing away in Canada recently at the age of 96. He came, he saw the kind of future he could build here, and he worked hard to achieve it. Today, his descendants benefit from his vision of the future. It is a story of enduring beauty, of one man starting only with the belief that he could never starve here in this land, and building a brilliant future on that solid foundation. As a nation, and as individual persons, we make our tomorrow. We design the future. We mould our destiny, to use that famous phrase L F S Burnham coined. We count among us many individuals who designed their lives to rise from rags to riches, from barefoot village boy to global, world class professional, from poor and bedraggled to world statesman. Cho Kee showed us how. He planted his yard in the warm sun, educated his children, embraced his place in the Guyanese society, built a small business whose edifice still stands today. He dreamed of a future, and designed it. He taught us that each of us could also design our future to make the Guyanese nation a global 21st century success story. Today, are we stumbling into a default future where failure deflates our self-image? Are we building and designing a future of vision, of a clear mental model of tomorrow?