In her first glimpse of humans, weeks after wandering lost in the jungle near starvation with her sister, watching her uncle die, and escaping a stalking jaguar, 13-year-old Bertina Domingo felt the courage drain out of her.
“I was frighten and my sister tell me ‘don’t frighten, leh we shout for them,’” she recounted. “We stand up and watch them long…I tell her ‘you shout,’” Bertina recalled. As her then 9-year-old sibling Bernadette Domingo shouted, they were eventually noticed by miners who were on the other side of the river and they came over to the siblings. “They wan know who is them keeping noise,” Bertina said.
“We tell them we lost, we tell them we uncle make we get away and we lost,” she said, adding that the miners wanted to know if there were other people close by.
There were no others and on May 8, 1995, over a month after wandering lost in the dense forest, Bertina and Bernadette, who survived using their traditional knowledge after watching their uncle die, finally glimpsed human beings again. “I feel glad when I see them people,” Bertina recalled adding that she was also scared. The sisters were eventually brought to Georgetown and after their gripping story of survival was made public, the sisters were hailed as heroines and the following year, were awarded the Medal of Service by the late President Dr Cheddi Jagan.
Nineteen years later, Bertina, who once expressed a wish to be a nurse, still remembers the incident though she hardly ever talks about it, she told Stabroek News in an interview in the remote rainforest community of Apoteri in Region Nine recently. At 32, she is now the mother of six children and living in Apoteri, farming and fishing in the jungle surrounding the remote village located