During our recent coverage of a product display staged at the Pegasus Hotel through a collaborative effort between the Sonia Noel Foundation for the Creative Arts and the Women’s Association for Sustainable Development we met and spoke with a number of women who are aggressively seeking to turn their creative passions into entrepreneurial pursuits. Beginning this Friday we are publishing short but we hope readable stories on their journeys thus far.
We first met Roxanne a week ago, today, at an event at the Pegasus Hotel staged by the Sonia Noel Foundation for the Creative Arts, a modest display of some of the outcomes of the creative pursuits of Guyanese women. While she is now retired from her civilian job as an Auditor with the Guyana Defence Force she is not about to let the grass grow under her feet. Determined to stay gainfully occupied she is reaching back into her past to reclaim childhood passions which, even with the compelling distractions of grown up responsibilities, have never really deserted her.
Her passion for plants is arguably the strongest. That was nurtured and grew during her childhood years at Sandvoort, West Canje, growing up with her grandmother. Herself and her sister lay claim to separate areas in the yard where they lived to each cultivate their own flower patches, a pursuit that became a passion and afterwards, a competition. Along the way Roxanne cultivated other passions…like creating floral arrangements decorations and fabric design. These days, she is preoccupied with honing these pursuits into a post-retirement enterprise which she has christened Diverse Anuili, the name of the business enterprise which, she says, she is on the verge of registering as a business.
Next year, after she has relocated from her Norton Street address to her new home at Covent Garden on the East Bank Demerara, the building of a business enterprise out of a clutch of passions will begin in earnest. She talks about transforming her new home into a shrine to her passions, her horticultural passions taking pride of place.
Already, she has begun to warm to the idea of creating a state of stronger intimacy between herself and her plants and flowers. Her Covent Garden home, she says, will house a far more elaborate sanctuary to this passion. Speaking, she becomes carried away by her passion and seemingly without being quite aware of it she drifts into a vivid description of just how her plants and flowers will become integrated into the very architecture of her home and how she intends to extract the additional payback of fashioning her pleasure into a business. She thinks of it, she says, not as a post-retirement pursuit, a kind of comfortable drift into ageing but as the beginning of a new, more fulfilling existence that could perhaps provide her with equal shares of emotional satisfaction and material reward.
The plan, going forward, includes an envisaged partnership with a cousin whose horticultural passion appears to match hers. They are, it seems, already beginning to fashion a plan that includes providing services that have to do with the proper tending of plants and flower gardens for clients who, like her, may have a love affair with nature but may be averse to making the effort necessary to ensure that their plants and flowers remain beautiful to look at.
There is more. Her ‘other life,’ Roxanne says, will extend beyond her passion for plants. She parades her culinary talents, talking up her baking skills (she has recently completed two wedding cakes). Her white pudding, she says, could become ‘top shelf’ stuff if she puts her mind to it. Beyond these and her interest in fashion and fabric design she discloses, as well, her interest in clothing and modeling, a pursuit with which she has had brushes and which she may still not have left entirely behind.
