Ninety-seven-year-old Cecil Thomas was the first toshao of Campbelltown, which is the closest village to Mahdia, in Region Eight, at just a five-minute walk away.
Thomas was appointed in 1969, when the community of just two families and one man was renamed. It was previously known as “Bucktown.”
The community is out of the hustle and bustle of the town, yet close enough to have access to its hospital, supermarkets, police station, airstrip and restaurants. Thomas, who was originally from Wakapau in the Pomeroon River, settled in Campbelltown in 1969 as he found that it had better access to basic amenities.
“When I come here first, this place wasn’t developed like this,” he said. “It had more forests, no houses. Campbelltown didn’t have no boundary line. After a few mornings a man from Canada by the name of Mr Scow visited and he said ‘Amerindian people supposed to get their land’ and he and a schoolmaster name Mr Fraser invited me and said I must be the captain for the area and so I was appointed captain in 1969. Campbelltown had two families at the time, a man and his wife and a next man name Simon, he had his family with him here too.
“Through employment I come to Mahdia. Some English people come in to drill for … gold so I get employment with them. They come for three years and I work with them for the three years then I started working with BG Consolidation Goldfields….”
Thomas spent another three more years working for this company before it closed. After two years of working only odd jobs, he was offered a job with public works. It entailed working from Mahdia to Bartica. He got so caught up with work, he never returned to Wakapau.
However, after he had children of his own, Thomas sent them to Wakapau to attend school. They had to stay at the mission where the school was located and did not like it. After numerous complaints from his children, Thomas moved them back to Campbelltown with him and their mother.
He noted that many of the people who took up residence in Campbelltown arrived from villages on the other side of the mountains that can be seen from Campbelltown. According to the man many of the families who settled here back in the earlier years, related to him that they liked that Campbelltown was mostly a flat area, which made it easier to plant, instead of having to farm on the sides of the mountains. He said, too, that most of the development was not from people living in nearby Mahdia, but through people from villages in other parts of Guyana.
In the 1980s, Campbelltown began to see an influx of people due to mining. At the time, the gold industry was thriving.
Though he has a very good memory and could enjoy a hearty conversation, Thomas suffers from hypertension and diabetes. His feet swell and to prevent this he has to keep them elevated. Asked whether he visits the hospital in Mahdia, the man said because it is difficult for him to get around, he is unable to but he is a member of the clinic there and his daughter, who is a nurse at the same hospital would uplift his necessary medication.
He gets by financially with the help of his old age pension and assistance from his daughter. Thomas moves around with the aid of a walking stick. In addition to his illnesses, he also been diagnosed with cataract, but intends to do nothing to remedy this.
Asked what he development he thinks the area needs, Thomas said he was more concerned about the youth, and hoped more could be done for them in the education and sport sectors to keep them occupied in things that will be beneficial for them.
‘Jaguars and Kanaimas’
Inez Francis and Mavis George sat in the last two pews in the almost empty Share the Light Ministries Church where there had been a funeral service only moments before. The funeral was for an elderly man who had lived at Seventy-Two Miles and recently moved to Campbelltown to be taken care of by his daughter. The women did not know the deceased, but they attended the funeral service in support of the man’s daughter.
Francis was born in Campbelltown to parents who hailed from Kurukubaru in the North Pakaraimas. “My mother said she came here when she was around 12. Some people had brought her brother here [adopted him] when she was a little girl, then after her father died, she and her mother come looking for him [the adopted brother] but they never find him. After my grandmother come here, she met someone else [her second husband] and stayed here in Campbelltown,” the woman said.
Francis said it was nicer when she was little, because Campbelltown was more of a jungle and she liked this. She recalled walking through a track to go to school. It seemed the more Francis talked about living in Campbelltown surrounded by a jungle, the more she was fascinated with the memory of it, although she said it was scary mainly because of jaguars and kanaimas. The latter is said to be an evil spirit that possesses people, causing them to become deadly animals or go into a murderous rage.
“We had plenty people went missing and died because of the kanaima. I was afraid of both. You see, the jaguars used to come into the village and go away with the dogs. As children we go to school in groups, we go and bathe in groups. At the time, it was like five families living here,” she recalled.
Back in the day, the creek was clean, and people would drink from it but not anymore. However, people still bathe in the creek.
At the time we spoke it was not yet Christmas, and Francis was looking forward to her pepperpot and the Parakari and Cassiri drinks.
Francis travels back and forth between Campbelltown and Georgetown, where some of her children live. As a pensioner, she wishes that the nearby town or even Campbelltown could have a bank. With no banking system or a wireless money transfer company, the only way to send and receive money is through the Mahdia Post Office. “The bank system is really needed because right now I get a letter from the bank; for couple months I didn’t bank and now they sending me a letter that I must go and reactivate my account and this and that and all kind of thing and I can’t go and do that. If there is a bank here, you can just step across and you can get a lil ten thousand,” Francis said.
She mentioned also that while Mahdia has a bigger hospital than before, it seemed to be having frequent issues with the machines responsible for doing x-rays and ultrasounds, which would see patients in most cases having to head to Georgetown.
Asked why not stay with her children living in Georgetown, the woman said that in Georgetown, everything calls for money. She shared that her grandson who attends nursery school gets there in a taxi, whereas, in Campbelltown, the schools are situated nearby. Francis is a proud grandmother of ten.
George, better known in Campbelltown as ‘Auntie May,’ was listening keenly while I spoke with Francis and was eager to share her experience. She was also born and raised in Campbelltown. “Daddy come from Kurukubaru and my grandmother come from Paramakatoi,” she related. “When she came, my mother came with her too. I can say much about my grandmother. My grandmother was a hard-working woman. I remember my grandmother saying she used to work, and she used to go and bleed balata in Paramakatoi right, and fetch it and the money that she earn, she buy a gun. When she come here, she brought that gun with her and it was that gun that help us to always have meat in we pot. Some of the meat we used to cook was labba, acouri, birds; like Inez said right ’round here was plenty bush, so you didn’t have to go far, you right in you yard and you shooting.”
She said, too, that with no secondary schools in the area when she was a girl, she and the other girls, after completing primary school, went on to be married and have children of their own. She was 18 when she got married, a little older than the average age of brides in her time.
Auntie May bore three children, but only two are alive. She also has 13 grandchildren, most of whom she cares for. “I love my grandchildren. Their mothers gone and left them and forget them. They are like mine. Today I have two school leavers who completed school in July, and I would normally encourage them to get jobs; one is still waiting to go to do nursing and the boy he’s doing excavator training. I have five others attending the secondary department and three more in the primary department. They are big children now and they does help me a lot. Sometimes they get up and help make breakfast and I cook lunch. Their fathers would support financially. They are good company and they help me a lot; you see in the farms, man, these children would work.”
They plant cassava aback of their house. George said that her grandchildren working in the farm is not much different than when she was a girl, while adding that having a hard worker for a grandmother, she worked in the farm with her as soon as she was old enough to help. “I always tell my grandchildren; I never like to farm. Me and she [her grandmother] would go under the bush, we gon cut down, we gon burn, we gon plant, we got to weed, we farm got to clean, I never like that, you know, but I still do it because I like me cassava bread. I like me cassiri. I like me mauby and I make all of them. One time I went and do extraction when a [dental] team was up here and one of the dentists said, ‘Auntie you can’t eat cassava bread you know,’ and I said, ‘why’. Hear he, ‘because you took out an eye-teeth [canine tooth] and you have a bad wound and you can’t eat hard cassava’. I seh, ‘cassava bread and sauce is me lines’ and he said ‘well as long as is sauce, you gon soak up you cassava bread first before you eat it right’ and I said, ‘yeah man I gon do that’. He telling me I can’t eat cassava bread, that’s my lines which I eat with tuma pot and I eat tuma pot in all fashion, callaloo, the deer-leaf callaloo and the Chinee callaloo and you put yuh pepper and yuh fish and man you get nice food,” she enthused.
George caters for school events, something she has been doing for some years now, which, according to her, was the result of her grandchildren “selling her out” when they told a teacher that their grandmother makes really nice fried rice. That turned into her cooking for them years after for almost every occasion.
Francis piped up to say that Aunty May makes lovely dhal puri as well.
George said the people of Campbelltown years ago were loving and contented people, unlike some of the people who live there today. According to her, they are jealous people who would cast spells to make the persons they envy sick or even go as far as killing them. She went on to say that these people do not originally belong to Campbelltown but migrated from other communities.
‘Potential’
Aunty Mavis shared that it saddens her to see many of the youth in her community being influenced by marijuana. Turning to Francis, she told her that recently she saw a young boy, not yet a teenager, whose sister gave him an exercise book from which he tore a leaf to cut the herb up.
“You see the children in that same road at the church street there where that little boy live, all of them smoke marijuana. They go to school. People talk to them about using it but still they not stopping. These children are addicted to it and I’m sorry for them, some of them I know. Sometimes I would go to them and say, ‘how you do’. I try to reach out to them and tell them that it is not good and that they are throwing away their education like that. Sometimes even in school, the headmistress said that some of them does come to school high, and they can’t cope with the schoolwork and some of them sleeping in school. This is at the secondary department… You know how much time welfare officers come to the school? But we have to pray, we have to do a lot of praying. Some of these children do this because their parents are separated, some of them go home and they ain’t got no food at home and they have no love and where there is no love, you gon find children running into bad company. I think right now we want jobs for these young people so that they can stay busy. We also need a rehabilitation centre. Some of them I talk with they say, ‘Auntie ah trying, ah trying but ah can’t mek it’ and I know that a child without a father or a mother or a proper somebody to guide them, will [continuously] fall back into this mess because they don’t have anybody to keep encouraging them”, Francis, a former PTA chair, said.
She noted that persons—specifically the men—are settling in Campbelltown because there are jobs. Asked whether she thought young people were making too many excuses so as not to do the same jobs, she said that some of them are. The woman said there are not too many jobs for women, except for small businesses and domestic work. She added that she would not advise women to take up bar jobs as they are often taken advantage of. She knew persons who had been in similar situations. Nonetheless, she strongly believes that Campbelltown has potential and would encourage anyone to live there.
