For more than 20 years, Desiree McKenzie has been making her way to the Bourda Market three or four times a week to run her modest stall offering an assortment of books and magazines for sale. Book vending in municipal markets is an old, but less than lucrative trade. Over time, its profit margins have been cruelly undermined by the advent of electronics, though even the emergence of the Kindle has not been able to entirely displace the particular pleasure of reading the paperback.
Comfortably in her sixties McKenzie’s interest in books goes beyond what little she earns from the pursuit. A passionate believer in education, she offers used text books for all levels as well as novels and magazines. Her reading material has been largely responsible for the relationships she has developed with schoolchildren and with “older people,” whom she says are amongst her best customers.
McKenzie was an early school leaver, though her encounter with the Burrowes School of Art and with famous Guyanese artist Stanley Greaves meant that she ended up teaching Art and Craft at the Cummings Lodge Secondary School.
A member of the Charlotte street-based African Welfare Convention, McKenzie has been given responsibility for remedial education. Earlier this week she ran a small advertisement in the Stabroek News, declaring her interest in tutoring “slow learners.” The initiative, she says, started with four children, whose families had more or less given up on them. She boasts more than modest achievement with at least two Grade Six children, who, though not high-flyers, did much better than their parents expected at the examination.
McKenzie is offering no miracles, but believes that particularly in areas of basic literacy she can make a difference. Her classes cost $5,000 per month and she is prepared to work with students of any age group. It is, she says, all about taking people who need it to the level where they can enjoy the benefits of being much more than functionally literate.
