A search team yesterday failed to find 23-year-old Aliya Bulkan, who leapt into the Kaieteur Falls gorge on Saturday.
The team, which included the young woman’s father, scoured the area but the search was fruitless. It continues today. Relatives said yesterday that they are finding it difficult to accept that the young woman ended her life by plunging off the Kaieteur cliff. Aliya was a young woman full of life whose only problem was not finding a job in the US after graduating with honours, they said.
The girl, who had at one time wanted to become an astronomer, blazed a trail of academic achievement from a tender age, writing poems before going on to top the country at the Secondary School’s Entrance Examina-tion (SSEE). She left home “normal” on Saturday morning to visit Kaieteur Falls with her friend, Lisa. They were among a group of nine persons, including four Koreans, in the Roraima Airways tour. “When she left yesterday morning [Saturday] she left normal, she said goodbye to us there was nothing strange”, her sister Camilla told this newspaper yesterday.
Relatives said that the next thing they heard was that Aliya had disappeared over the waterfalls at around 11 am that day. The young woman was the second of three daughters of Rustum and Kamini Bulkan.
Owner of Roraima Airways, Captain Gerry Gouveia told Stabroek News that one of the Korean women saw Aliya run and plunge over the edge of the waterfall. The woman and her three companions left the country yesterday morning. He said that she had related that Aliya turned back and started to scream before going over.
By the time the rest of the group caught up with the traumatized Korean woman she was screaming hysterically. Aliya was the last person in the line of tourists with the Korean woman just ahead of her. Lisa, Gouveia said, had stopped and was waiting for Aliya when the incident happened.
At Aliya’s New Provi-dence, East Bank Demerara home yesterday, her mother was at a loss for words and would only say she was anxiously awaiting word from the search party. Camilla, who is one year older than Aliya, said the family has no idea why the young woman took her own life even as she added that no one, except the Korean woman whom they have not been able to speak with, saw her plunge over the precipice.
Camilla said that when her sister left on Saturday she was in good spirits and relatives noticed nothing strange about her. They later spoke with Lisa, who related that her friend was laughing and talking on the trip and did not display any signs of depression. Camilla asserted that her sister was just unhappy that she could not get a job in the US.
Honours
Aliya had graduated last December from the Stony Brook University in New York with honours and had hoped to secure a job as an editor of a publishing house. Her sister feels that it was a feat she would have easily achieved since Aliya worked with three lecturers during her final year and would take over the classes in their absence. Had it not been for the fact that she graduated when the US was facing recession, she would have easily gotten the job since she was adequately qualified, Camilla said.
She added that Aliya, whom she described as a genius and very artistic, was unhappy at not finding the job and recently they decided to give up their apartment and return home. “I thought because she was away from home for such a long time, over five years, she wanted to be near family and friends and I thought by coming home would have made it better for her,” said the grieving sister, who left her job to return to Guyana with her younger sibling. “It’s only last month we came home for her to take a break”.
“I don’t know what to believe,” Camilla said about the tragedy. She said her sister turned and ran and some thought she may have forgotten her camera. “Beyond that no one really know what happened except for the Korean woman”, she stated.
She confirmed that her younger sister had deactivated her profile from the social network Facebook but could not state the reason for this action. “But when we came back [from the US] she was talking, we baked a cake everything was normal, there was nothing out of order,” Camilla stressed adding that the only problem was not having a job and probably being away from home. Aliya, according to her sister, was a very private person “who did not talk a lot and she wouldn’t cry in front of anyone.” She however, acknowledged that her sister might have kept problems to herself. “My sister was a brilliant person, she was a genius, she was very artistic,” Camilla said.
When Stabroek News left the home relatives were hoping that there would be some word on the fate of Aliya. When she topped the country at the SSEE in 1998 the former St Margaret’s student had said she wanted to become an astronomer. She was featured in the newspapers again when she graduated from Queen’s College with eight grade one’s and two grade two’s in the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations.
