Rebecca’s Rust is situated between Harmony Hall and Carlton Hall at Mahaicony, East Coast Demerara, approximately 47 kilometres from Georgetown. The village and Harmony Hall were once considered one community, which was called High Dam and some persons still use that name today.
Although the Gazetteer of Guyana has the village documented as Rebecca’s Rust, the signboard in the village says Rebecca’s Lust. There are rice fields on one side and pasture lands on the other, the latter is now being used for construction.
The village has a homey feel to it. In fact, many of its residents are related by blood. But before I could meet any of them, I had my first encounter with blood suckers: mosquitoes, three at once.
My next encounter and a good one at that was with the charming Prince Albert Pompey. “You have Rebecca’s Rust and you have Harmony Hall and the whole place you call it High Dam,” he told me. “High Dam is the call name. Rebecca’s Rust is rumoured to have existed since the days of the slaves. When they would have been freed, I heard, they pooled their monies and bought the estate, naming it after one of the former slaves.”
Pompey moved to the village in 1945. He hails from Ann’s Grove. He was 14 when Rebecca’s Rust became home. Today Pompey is the oldest resident at 88, yet he remembers it like it was yesterday. His mother passed away when he was three years old leaving him to be raised by an aunt and his grandfather. After writing his “school leaving examination,” he said, he began attending a standard high school in Georgetown, where he stayed with a relative. He did this for two years until his grandfather arrived one day, unannounced, and made an immediate decision to take him home as he was dissatisfied with the care his grandson was receiving.
Having left school, Pompey first took up work selling tickets at the Clonbrook Train Station. He later went off into the diamond fields in the interior, where he worked for ten years. Pompey got married in 1966 and continued working in the mines for two years after that. When he left in 1968, he went to work at a bitumen plant on the East Bank Demerara for two years before moving on to take up work in sea defence construction for almost four years.
“When I come here, there was no drainage and irrigation. The new canal was dug in 1954/1955 during the interim government. [It was] called the Bellamy Canal. That runs from the Mahaicony River to the Mahaica River. Then there’s the Rutherford Canal, from the Mahaica River to Broom Hall. Broom Hall is two villages from here. During my time as councillor and chairman was when the canal was put in.
“When we got independence in 1966, the founder leader, which was LFS Burnham, every year end does go to Ithaca and come back. He used to stop at High Dam here and he ask us what we need in this place, so we tell him we need a canal to get irrigation water from the Mahaica Creek. He said there was the old canal, called Rutherford Canal, and he tell us go and clean it and that he will send a dragline and so we start getting water from the Mahaica Creek coming up to Broom Hall. We meet on a Saturday and he said by Monday, he’ll send the dragline and Monday he send it up.”
Pompey said their health centre was built in 1968 by self-help and Burnham sent materials and a carpenter to guide them. “The downstairs is the community centre; the upstairs was the health centre. The health centre has been moved now; we stop using it last year. We’re using a new brand health centre at Carlton Hall now. They plan on using the health centre part as part of the community centre…,” he related.
Although retired, Pompey is a Commissioner of Oaths, which he has been for 35 years. Of all the jobs he has done, Pompey worked the longest with the Woodland/Farm Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC), serving as a councillor from 1970 to 1979, before becoming vice chairman of the NDC for an additional nine years. He was later chairman for 19 years and served the council a total of 48 years before retiring last December.
Pompey has received several awards for his dedicated service, including the Golden Arrow of Achievement.
Today, he still takes care of himself and his home and his two sons visit periodically.
Rebecca’s Rust, Pompey said, has come a long way from 1945 and before his light goes out, he would like to see his village provided with streetlights.
‘I really love this place’
Iola McAlmont-Daniels is Pompey’s niece. She was born in the village some 50-odd years ago. Currently she’s the senior mistress at De Hoop Primary School. A graduate senior mistress, McAlmont-Daniels was transferred to the school a year ago, though she has been teaching for 27 years. She began at Zeeland Primary School, where she taught for 21 years. She spent the next 5-plus years at Carlton Hall Primary. She will be retiring soon and hopes to spend her remaining teaching days in the same bliss and zest she began with.
“I really enjoyed my early days of teaching but it’s getting difficult now. The children are changing; social media changed everything as far as I’m concerned,” she said. “You have to constantly be behind them to revise and to do their work on their own. We have to change our teaching methods and we are doing that. You have to be studying way hours into the night to get things streamlined for the children the next day; you have to improve teaching strategies every day.”
She added that while children in the earlier days balanced their schoolwork with outdoor games, “[today’s children] don’t know anything about hopscotch, or marbles, jack-in-the-box or salt; they don’t have much recreational activities because they are so taken up with other things. For the children to play [those games] you have to teach them now.”
“I really love this place,” McAlmont-Daniels said, while noting that she went to live in Ann’s Grove for a few months and after she finished building her house she went back into her home community “because I love it very much.”
As a wife, mother, teacher and assistant pastor of her church McAlmont-Daniels noted that she is on the go from Sunday to Sunday. She is also engaged in activities with the children of her church.
All aspects of her life seem to surround the upbringing of children, of which she is very proud. She is currently doing a one-year programme on special needs children.
McAlmont-Daniels wishes that more can be done for the children, specifically the youths of her village and hopes that the renovations to the community centre cater specifically for them.
‘Sacrifices’
Gail Budburgh was downstairs with her children when we met. She hails from Moraikobai and moved to Rebecca’s Rust four years ago with her family in search of better schooling for her children. A mother of eight, Budburgh said the decision to move came after her daughter had passed to go to a secondary school, but there was none in her village. Moraikobai is 96 miles up the Mahaicony River, a distance too far to commute to the closest high school.
Adjusting to life in Rebecca’s Rust, the woman said, was difficult for the family. Her husband provides for the family by working as a labourer but jobs are not always available. Budburgh helps by planting a kitchen garden. Once they moved, the family found they had to take on new responsibilities like rent and other bills they never had to deal with before.
“For the sake of our children, we’re making these sacrifices,” she said. “We have our own place in Moraikobai. We come out with the tugboat that was pulling a pontoon of lumber. We take a day and a night to get here. We had to sleep on the lumber. It’s scary knowing that it has no sides and the children can easily fall into the river. Though we been here four years now we would go and come whenever there’s school vacation. While we’re there, we have to pay the rent though on one is living here. We plan on moving back when the children finish school; the smallest boy is at nursery. We glad if we can get a secondary school in Moraikobai.”
While Budburgh prefers to live in Moraikobai, she noted that Rebecca’s Rust was more fertile for farming, unlike the sandy area she is from; she does not have to deal with acushi ants either.
Berbician Merlin Farinha originally belongs to the village of Seafield, better known as Number 42. She was flanked by a granddaughter and two great granddaughters when I visited. Farinha moved to Rebecca’s Rust after getting married.
Asked what she liked about Rebecca’s Rust, she answered: “To be away from family is nice. You have that privacy.”
The topic quickly moved to mosquitoes as the evening began to settle in. “At this time right now, with the rain falling, they are terrible. Even to yesterday I saw a white head one,” she said, “the one that they say does give malaria. But we don’t have malaria here. The only people that would get the malaria here is the ones that would be going into the interior.”
Although the mobile shops traverse the area often, Farinha, like many of her other neighbours, would venture to Mahaica where the market and supermarkets are.
Her great granddaughters, she said, attend nearby school situated in opposite directions: Carlton Hall Primary and Helena Primary.
Having noticed the cemetery across from the church I assumed it belonged to the church but just to confirm this I asked Farinha about it. “To be honest with you, this area here doesn’t have burial ground. That’s a family burial ground,” she replied. “That’s the Rutherford’s burial ground. I married to a Farinha and our burial ground is not too far from here. Many of the families here buried their dead behind their homes. All like Feliz, the Robertsons them, their burial ground right at the back of them. Me now from Berbice, when I die, I would like to go back to Berbice.”
As I was about to leave the village, Gail Budburgh called out to me. Her neighbour, 15-year-old Vanavah Abrams, wanted to be part of the ‘World Beyond Georgetown’ feature.
Abrams, a Science student of Mahaicony Secondary School, moved to Rebecca’s Rust with her family from a village called Compound in Port Kaituma, Region One. “Seven of us [made the] move. Everybody was hoping for betterment; some wanted jobs, and some wanted better education. School here is great. You just got to put your mind to it, and you will achieve what you want to achieve,” she said.
She and one of Budburgh’s daughters attend the same school. They are neighbours as well as distant relatives. It was after a few conversations that they learned that Budburgh’s parents and Abrams’s grandmother were related. Learning this has brought them closer.
Because the people of Rebecca’s Rust are somewhat reserved, Abrams misses living in Compound. She said when she lived in Region One, there were more activities and adventures. What she does like about Rebecca’s Rust is that the people are always on the lookout for each other and that makes her feel like part of an extended family.
Now that school is out, she is hoping for a part-time job as she dislikes having to sit at home for two months. On the afternoon we met, the teen had just returned from Mahaica. She had gone in search of a job but had no luck.
Nonetheless, she believes whatever you want in life is possible only if you choose to take that step.
Abrams has big dreams for herself. She wants to pursue a career in medicine while owning a bakery in Compound, which she says is a hotspot for business. “The good thing about living out here is that teenagers are more focused on their studies. In there, teenagers seem to have a different mindset; they don’t care about getting jobs or they don’t worry about their future. They only think about living in the moment and messing their lives up… Persons out here are more serious and competitive and have higher standards for themselves. When you’re around people like I’m around, you begin to want to do better for yourself,” she said.
As it relates to the community centre, Abrams wishes that activities can be created to cater for persons of different ages. “They should have bingo games for elderly persons on Saturdays; sewing classes on Friday evenings and cake decoration classes. If we work together, we can make this happen,” she added.
