Guyana’s honorary consul to Jamaica since 1996, attorney Indera Persaud says people from around the world are making enquiries about Guyana and people with little or no roots to the country now want Guyanese nationality on account of the oil boom.
“Everybody wants to go to Guyana. Everybody and his friend want to be a Guyanese. Guyana is a thriving country and people want to see where their heritage and inheritance may lie. Everyone whose grandmother or parents were born in Guyana and living overseas, have citizenship by birth,” she told Stabroek Weekend in an interview.”
Since the discovery of oil in 2015, Persaud said, Jamaica’s business and corporate communities including, banking, insurance, logistics, have shown an interest in Guyana and have been visiting.
“Covid-19 threw a damper on corporate activities but a lot of Jamaicans have been travelling to and from Guyana over the last year since the borders were reopened,” she said.
The consulate is very busy, she said. “A lot of Guyanese have lived in Jamaica since the 1940s and 1950s, mainly for tertiary education,” she noted. “Lots are professionals. They always have passport issues. I process the passports for everyone and grant visas. I also issue birth and death certificates and the like. I do everything that one person can do in a foreign mission. So it is anything and everything.”
In recent times, she said, she got a query through a solicitor in London from a British adult who was interested in becoming a Guyanese national. The person’s adoptive parents were born Guyanese but gave up their nationality for UK citizenship. She forwarded the query to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs with advice.
“I said the person is entitled to citizenship because a child who is born in Guyana to Guyanese parents is the same as a child who is adopted. There is no distinction. Someone in the ministry told me the person has to go to Guyana and apply for citizenship. I said, ‘You guys got it wrong.’ They had to go through the Ministry of Legal Affairs to confirm what I had advised,” she said.
Since the establishment of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), she said, more Guyanese are travelling to Jamaica. The Guyanese population there numbers about 2,000. Some have been in Jamaica for years and are not registered with the consulate but only visit when their passports have expired or are about to expire.
“Many see Jamaica as a stepping stone to the First World countries. They are trained and find jobs where they earn a fairly decent salary as a professional and then move on. It is very rare for Guyanese to stay here for as long as we have. Few families have actually stayed,” she noted.
Because of the CSME, she never applied for Jamaican citizenship.
“We have always maintained that because we are all Caricom nationals, we don’t need citizenship to benefit from what the country offers. I have lived and worked here in the government system for so long prior to the CSME and I never had a work permit. It might have been illegal,” she added.
Once the CSME was implemented, she and her husband were among the first to apply for the Skills Certificate.
Coming to Jamaica
Persaud first journeyed to Jamaica in 1985 to pursue a Legal Education Certificate at Norman Manley Law School, having already acquired the Bachelor of Laws from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Cave Hill, Barbados.
“It was an exciting time to be in Jamaica. In those days everybody from the Caribbean went to Barbados to finish the two last years of the degree. That was how we got to know everybody from the region,” she said.
After the completion of their degrees, students in the region were assigned to either Hugh Wooding Law School in Trinidad and Tobago (TT) or Norman Manley based on geographical location. Guyana being closer to TT, Persaud was assigned Hugh Wooding but wanted to go to Norman Manley to meet with a well-known orthopaedic surgeon for an old injury to her left hip she had sustained when she was 11 years. She applied for entry to Norman Manley giving as her reason the need for further medical treatment. The approval came through but she had to wait a year before going to Jamaica.
“That year I worked at the University of Guyana (UG) with Dr Clive Thomas in the Institute of Development Studies as a tutor/researcher,” she said.
She paid for her tuition at Norman Manley, while her parents met her living expenses.
“By that time, my mom had emigrated to the US and she was the main person who helped me,” she added.
Persaud met her husband, Dayanand Sawh, when he was a medical student and a Guyana scholar at UWI, Mona. They were married in 1987, six months after she graduated. Sawh, the eldest of his brothers who were all Guyana scholars and medical doctors, studied at UWI, Mona. After she graduated she practised law in Jamaica.
They had three daughters who were born in Jamaica. “They were brought up in our Guyanese culture and traditions but they are strong, independent Jamaican women,” she said.
The eldest, a medical doctor, is a graduate of UWI, Mona and is currently in the UK in the final stages of training to be an ophthalmologist. She is married to a Trinidadian medical doctor. Her second daughter is also a medical doctor, who by age 22 had already earned her MBBS at UWI Mona, where she is doing post-graduate studies in anesthesiology. Her last daughter, a 19-year-old, is about to enter UWI and is looking at computer technology.
In 1990, Persaud said, “My husband finished his internship and returned to Guyana to serve the government as part of his contract. He dragged me with him and I was called to the bar.” By then they had their first child who was a year old.
Persaud worked at Luckhoo and Luckhoo. She joined the Guyana Bar Association and served as Secretary under Ashton Chase, who was President. She also joined the Guyana Association of Women Lawyers (GAWL) and was part of the leaflet project that was subsequently enhanced and published into a booklet called, ‘The Law and You’, funded by Futures Fund. “Josephine Whitehead, Roxane George, Rosemary Benjamin and I researched 31 areas of the law,” Persaud said. “Danuka Radzik did the artwork.”
Persaud took the idea from a radio programme called, The Law and You, which she had done in Jamaica.
Based on her experience and that of her husband, she believes that Jamaicans are more educated about their laws and legal jargon, and their own health and wellness than Guyanese.
On her return to Guyana, she shared her experience with the women lawyers, noting the need to educate the local population about their rights on the laws of the country. “We started a radio programme also called, The Law and You,” she recalled.
Persaud’s first job in Jamaica after graduation was at a legal aid clinic. “People called on the phone. One day, even the secretary could not understand what the man was saying. She passed the phone to me. The man said, ‘I have been trying to explain to that woman that I need a lawyer to go to court and get this hocus pocus document. The court is going to release my son.’ I understood he needed a habeas corpus writ. In Guyana, the ordinary man wouldn’t tell you he wants to apply for a habeas corpus writ. He would just tell you he wants his son to get out of jail,” she surmised.
Settling in Jamaica
In 1993, she took up the offer of a scholarship from the British Council to pursue a postgraduate course, the Commonwealth Young Lawyers Diploma in London, England.
“In England I had my brush with racism and I was totally appalled. Some White people saw me on the road and called me ‘Black Bitch’ and that kind of thing. We always say Guyana is a racist place but I grew up in Georgetown and I never knew what racism was,” she said.
Persaud’s husband joined her in the UK but her daughter remained in Guyana. In 1994, her husband returned to Jamaica from the UK to start training in orthopaedics; his younger brothers were also studying at UWI.
“I went back to Guyana to pack up and sort out my office to return to Jamaica,” she said.
Back in Jamaica, she worked with the largest credit union in the country until 2009 after which she ventured into private practice with a law firm to do corporate work. She joined Norman Manley Law School as a tutor in 2012 and then got into an accident and broke the hip she had broken as a child. “I had a series of surgeries thereafter to enable me to get better,” she added.
As a trained mediator, she does mediation matters in the parish courts and arbitration for credit unions. “It is a process that the credit union laws allow before you venture into the courts,” she noted.
Of Jamaicans, she said, “They are one of the most welcoming people, especially to Guyanese. Trinidadians and Barbadians treated some of us rather badly, especially hucksters who were hustling to make a living. They treated Jamaicans very badly too. Jamaica has been good to me and my family,” Persaud said.
Background
Persaud’s parents were from Bath Settlement. They had ten children; seven boys and three girls.
When Persaud was about five years old, her father, Ernest, now 95, moved his entire family from Bath Settlement to live in Georgetown so they could have better educational and job opportunities.
“He saved up money to pay rent for six months in Georgetown. He did that mainly because he was already paying boarding and lodging for two of my brothers who were attending high schools in Georgetown,” she recalled.
Persaud attended St Winefride’s Roman Catholic School, North Georgetown Secondary and sixth form at St Rose’s High School.
“In 1973 I injured my left hip, on account of running wild when I was 11 years old. I was hospitalised initially at Woodlands and then at the Georgetown Hospital, where I stayed for almost a year,” she recalled. “The accident occurred just before I was due to start high school. In 1974, I entered first form at North Georgetown on a pair of crutches.”
While at St Rose’s, she did a work study stint at Cameron and Shepherd, where she met her lifetime mentor, attorney Josephine Whitehead.
“As a young East Indian Hindu girl, a lot of the options were not to pursue a higher education,” she noted. “I saw my cousins being matched up with some suitable young men. I didn’t want to marry at a young age and my parents didn’t want that either for their daughters. I wanted to be financially independent.”
In 1981 Persaud was one of 25 students admitted to the Faculty of Law at UG, where she did economics and sociology as a precursor to the bachelor of law degree at UWI Cave Hill. In 1982, all the students were successful. However, Guyana, as a contributing country, had owed UWI a lot of money. That year the Guyana Government decided that all students going to UWI had to pay their own tuition.
“Only a handful of law students were able to go,” she recalled. “I was able to go because my mother and next door neighbour, a Jamaican woman working at Caricom and who became an adopted mother to me said, ‘You gotta go whether we have to beg or borrow that money.’”
That was when Persaud’s mother decided to move to the US, where she had family members. “She worked and sent money to me. That is how I went to Cave Hill for two years and subsequently to UWI Mona,” she said. “A lot of students could not come up with the money that year. A few went and could not continue. Tuition was about US$10,000 and the cost of living in Barbados was expensive.”
Previously, the law students had done a three-month stint in the Guyana National Service on the basis that the government would pay their tuition at Cave Hill. Her stint was at the New Opportunity Corps at Onderneeming, Essequibo Coast.
“I cried all the way on the ferry from Parika to Supenaam,” she said. “I had never left home before apart from going to UG. On the way my father said to me, ‘Girl dry you tears. Anything you want, you nose have to drip.’”
She has no regrets about her stay at Onderneeming. Dr Gladstone Mitchell, who was in charge of Suddie Hospital and whose daughters were her friends, visited her regularly to ensure she was well.
“He lived on Crown Street and we lived in Laluni Street in Queenstown. Interestingly, it was his daughter, Vivienne, who introduced me to my husband the day I came to Jamaica,” she said. “She dragged him from the lunchroom to meet me. He was not happy but she insisted and he complied.”
