Jo-Ann Forde’s background is not your run-of-the-mill one. She is the daughter of a pair of Assemblies of God pastors, who some years ago, opted to relocate to the Rupununi to preach the Gospel there. They have remained there since then and that is where she grew up and has lived for much of her life. It is an unlikely story and whilst she declares in unblemished English that she is “from Lethem,” her story halts you in your tracks until the clarification is offered.
Far from having left the hinterland, these days, her presence in the capital is accounted for by her two-fold mission being attending to the education of her two children and owning and operating a body care and massage therapy establishment named Innovoir, which is situated at 63 Garnett Street Campbellville.
Living in Lethem afforded Jo-Ann access to Brazil and fortuitously she was able to benefit from training in Body Care and Massage Therapy under the tutelage of a skilled practitioner in Boa Vista, a city some 130 kilometres across the border. Having been trained she further sharpened her skills by making her services available to family members, the experience readying her for entry into what, these days, is an industry that is as highly competitive as it is widely sought after.
Jo-Ann’s articulation of the essence of the discipline goes beyond the explaining the mundane benefits of a “good massage.” She believes that in essence massage therapy targets “the senses and emotions,” going way beyond addressing just the physical well-being. During our own admittedly limited research we stumbled upon no less than a dozen different types of massage, each serving its own particular purpose.
Once a year Jo-Ann returns to Lethem to refresh and relax. Penciled into her plans for 2020 is to be there for one of the biggest, best-known hinterland events, the Rupununi Rodeo where she will be seeking to take advantage of the seasonal market for her services.
Jo-Ann works mostly on her own though she has access to another therapist from the North Rupununi whenever the need arises.
Hers, she says, is a varied clientele that includes businesspersons, athletes and ordinary people who are simply pursuing options that would keep them healthy. “More and more people are now finding their way to massage therapy. It has become the number one healthy addiction. The market is growing. It provides a holistic health benefit.”
Without her saying so, you get the impression that Jo-Ann is earnestly seeking new breakthroughs for massage therapy in Guyana. One of the considerations that preoccupies her is the level of practitioner/client interaction that massage therapy facilitates. She believes that this facility provides an opening for the benefits of the service to be extended to enable the provision of other forms of treatment. Consequently, she says that she is now extending the discipline of psychology into her studies. She believes that in so doing she can marry her ‘healing hands’ with access to clients at the level of exchanges that can address equally deep psychological/emotional issues. Her goal here is to cause massage therapy to transcend what is often perceived as its one-dimensional role of physical healing. Ultimately, she seeks to have Innovoir become a holistic service that adds an emotional element to a service that is still largely regarded in Guyana as possessing a single purpose.
Her broader vision for Innovoir is, at its core, attractively innovative. It extends, pointedly, into the role of massage therapy in the world of sport. Once she gets to talking, this is where she leads the discourse into her future plans for Innovoir. The sports market, she believes, is one that remains largely unexploited in Guyana, the popularity of sport and the relationship between massage therapy and high-performance having long been established as an indisputable truism. Specifically, she raises the issue of the range of deep, intense techniques that are available through massage to restore mobility to weak and injured muscles. Stretching, compression, toning, and trigger-point response techniques are all available through the vehicle of massage. Here, she makes no secret of her belief that massage therapy is yet to become the tool that can be part of the process of preparation for competition, a deficiency that may well be closely connected to the fitness-related underperformance that so often afflicts our sportsmen and women. “Some athletes are simply not used to therapy,” she says.
Jo-Ann hopes to be a part of the process of raising awareness. She is keen to find outlets through which to begin the process of broadening the base of public knowledge of the nexus between therapy and performance in the field of sport. Part of her current mission involves reaching out to the various sports organisations (swimming would appear to be a particular interest here) in an effort to ‘spread’ the word in the sports fraternity, as a whole, with regard to the connection between massage therapy and reaching the goal of high performance in the chosen discipline.
Jo-Ann can be reached at telephone number (592)678-9337
