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.