For women in the Hopetown and Bel Air, West Coast Berbice communities life is a daily struggle, and while many of them work hard their spending power remains limited. However, a group of like-minded mothers have decided enough is enough.
Presenting themselves as ‘Women For Change’ thirteen women from the two villages have banded together to start an agri-processing company registered as Hopetown/Bel Air Incorporated. The peppers and other processed vegetables carry the brand name ‘Hopelair‘ – representing the two communities. For now they are producing mainly sauces such as pepper sauce, achar, creole seasoning and all-purpose sauces. The first batch was produced in early July.
Many of the women are single parents and have been working since they were children, and yet today, although some of their children are adults, they still have to face the daily grind of making a living and it is still not a comfortable living, they told Sunday Stabroek.
But they are not doing it for themselves, according to one of the members Patricia Bowman, who said that there are many single parents in the communities who are unable to find job. They hope one day soon that their company would expand to such a magnitude that it would facilitate the employment of women in the area.
“Our idea is to provide jobs for single mothers; there are a lot of young mothers out there without job and we want to empower them,” Bowman said in a recent interview.
She said they sell wholesale and retail and they usually take orders and then distribute. Every day they would meet to grind stuff, she continued, revealing that when she closes up her “little bottom house shop” she heads down to the small kitchen they have rented to grind produce, and sometimes they are there until very late in the night.
‘Big hearts’
Achieving their lofty goals is a tall order but Chairperson of the group Shamie McAlmont said that the women have big hearts and are hard-working individuals, and these are the two most important ingredients to get things off the ground.
Right now they bottle their products in a “small rent kitchen” in Hopetown and they are sold mainly in the Berbice area to two supermarkets, while persons also place orders. They are not making millions, but every cent earned since they came into existence is placed into a bank account which was created for this purpose. It is hoped that eventually they would earn enough in the first instance to buy two heavy-duty blenders to assist with the labour.
“Right now we use handmill to grind everything, and you could imagine how hard it is for us, and many of us have jobs or operate our own little business…” another group member, Galeann McPherson, said.
McPherson said she has a little shop and she also plants a garden and sells her produce. The 53-year-old mother of seven said she started selling at the age of twelve and she has been doing it all her life, even though she no longer sells in the market or travels miles to make purchases. She recalled in her younger days she would travel all hours of the day and night to purchase and sell, and even if “a just get baby a would get and go again. I would come home in the night, wash and so and then early next morning gone again.”
Another member of the group works three jobs; she is a security guard, a cleaner sweeper and she also works with the NDC cleaning drains.
“But she still finds time to come and grind with us, she still comes,” member Annette Nurse said of her colleague who was unable to make it to the interview with this newspaper.
And she also does some selling from her yard to help to earn an income.
And Bowman is confident that their products would be a winner even though she admitted that they have a lot of competition.
“But there is no other sauce like our sauces; we don’t do not put other stuff, any artificial ingredients and we are strictly organic,” she boasted.
Bowman revealed that she has been married since she was sixteen years old and is the mother of three. At one time she was a greens vendor at the market, and later she started “buying and selling wears and clothing” at two markets, Bath Settlement and Rosignol.
“But eventually things started getting tough in the markets, a real fight down, so I stopped doing that and I opened a little shop at my home, right downstairs…”
In jest the women said they have reached the age of retirement since they have already “work a lifetime” because of the tender age when they started working. And even though they have adult children the women insisted that they cannot be “burdens” to their children and “so we still have to work.”
Bowman said her youngest is twelve and she attends the Bishops‘ High School, so she has to find money for her to travel every day from Hopetown to Georgetown.
Register
McAlmont, an agriculturist with the Ministry of Agriculture Berbice office, said that the idea of the company was born out of a discussion with AFC Chairman Nigel Hughes, who during a walkabout in the villages indicated that he was willing to support any initiative that would empower the women.
The woman longed for more, but they probably needed a push because soon after Hughes’s visit, McAlmont said, 22 women came together to discuss the idea of starting a broiler business or an agro-processing business. In the end 13 of them stuck to their objective and with a start-up donation from Hughes their agro-processing business was up and on its way.
While the company has been registered she said that they are working on registering as Women For Change under the Friendly Societies Act, since their aim is not only to earn but to assist, and eventually they are hoping to become a charitable organisation.
She said it is important for them to focus on the welfare aspect of things because while their members are in need the communities at large also need assistance.
“We want to create jobs, we want to assist with education, we want to help out-of-school youths. And for some of us we are home-makers and housewives, but the spending power is not there and we would like to improve the social and economic life of those in the communities,” the chairperson said.
They already have access to a plot of land which they can use, and it is hoped that soon they would be able to fence the land and then start building their company which will also encompass their charitable work.
“First we want to have a good label and we are hoping to get the heavy duty blenders by next month which will see us working much faster,” McAlmont said.
She said once this is done some of the same members who are not full-time workers would be employed with the company while the others would be employed on a part-time basis, and in the end anyone else who wants to be a part of the group can do so by becoming an employee.
“The market right now is very small, but we are hoping to expand soon because we see this as a way of economic employment,” she added.
With that in mind the group plans to hold a Berbice Expo on October 27 in the compound of the Hopetown Primary School, through which they hope to garner some much needed funds.
McAlmont, a mother of one, explained that as an agriculturist who is out in the field, she has seen that whenever there is a glut of any kind of produce on the market, it is sold almost at a give-away price, and they are hoping they would be able to cash in on this. She said that whatever is in season would be processed and bottled for sale.
The other members of the group are Alecia James, Odessa James, Corlis McPherson, Coleen Fraser, Vida Cadogan, Mariam Fordyce, Elvina Embrack, Vanessa Simon, and Natasha McDonald.
