Becoming a pastor, counsellor, teacher and journalist are among the best things that have happened to Terrence Esseboom, 61, who says his training in these areas have helped him to steer others to get on the right path in life.
“Today they are successful in their careers. People don’t know their story. People would come and wake me up at midnight because they are on the verge of a break up. I have to get out of bed and counsel two people at war. Today, more than 10 or 15 years later, they are still together. You make a lot of sacrifices but it is part of the calling. Our principle is not to let your right hand know what your left hand does. You don’t talk about what you do. That’s it,” Esseboom says.
In an interview with Stabroek Weekend, Esseboom related how he joined his church, Light of Lights New Testament Church of God in Norton Street, Wortmanville, when he was 18 years old. He has been pastoring for 37 years at the same church he joined as a youth.
“That is all of my married life. For my 18th birthday I had a party upstairs of the Police Consumers Supermarket. My uncle had a restaurant there. I was a teacher at St Phillips at the time. We were all sporting up there. That was the last secular celebration I had. I was converted a little after that. By Old Year’s Night I was heading into church. I started going to church.”
Asked how he joined the church, Esseboom laughed and said, “I was going to dodge that part and hoping you wouldn’t ask me.”
He related that he saw a girl and liked her. “I didn’t know she was from this church. She invited me to go to church and of course I liked her and so I went. The church had a crusade and an elderly white woman, Irene Sawyer, I remember her name, was the preacher. She was preaching that Jesus was coming again. The truth is this conviction so gripped me I stopped blinking in the church. I kept my eyes open wide. I was afraid to blink because I said to myself if I blinked Jesus might come and I knew I wasn’t ready. The crises and the turmoil in my life [were] overwhelming. Eventually I yielded and I was converted.”
After a short while, he became a Sunday school teacher, shortly after a youth leader and then a few years later he became the assistant pastor. At one time, he was for many years, the education director for the church, which had responsibility for the bible school programme in the country.
When he married, he lived in West Demerara because he could not get affordable housing in town. The girl who invited him to church in the first place left it but he met his wife at the same church. Esseboom has two children and three grandchildren.
When the church was going through some challenging times, the overseer asked him to consider pastoring there. “Pastoring is a decision I haven’t regretted. During that time, I was also teaching at St Stephen’s Primary.”
Marrying many couples including some high profile ones, converting leading professionals and assisting people struggling to make ends meet are among the many highlights of his life. And while he shared some of these stories privately because he did not want to put anyone in the spotlight without their prior knowledge, he said, many members of his congregation were toddlers coming to that church when he started pastoring.
“That is one of the things I am really happy about. I dedicated some of them as toddlers or as babies and now I am dedicating their children. It is a generational thing. I saw many of them through their highpoints and low points in their life. I saw them go through high school, prayed with them for their exams, help them find jobs. I also advised some of the parents to send their children to university or higher learning. Some of them have gone on to be leading professionals in this country and overseas.”
Teaching career
Esseboom began his working life as a pupil teacher at St Phillip’s Primary, behind the then Guyana Broadcasting Corporation at 16 years. He was there for over two years.
“I started off as a primary school teacher, then I was a secondary school teacher, then I was a bible school teacher and then I was teaching communications at the University of Guyana (UG).
I never wanted to teach.”
He was offered a training opportunity as an electrical apprentice in Linden. His mother thought he was too young to leave home at 15/16 years, so she went to the Ministry of Education and applied for a teaching job for him.
“I never applied to teach. In retrospect, getting into teaching was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
One day when he was 19 years old, on arrival at home from school his mother told him she had a telegram for him.
“In those days when you heard the word ‘telegram’ it was mostly bad news. I started to tremble. Then I saw I was accepted into Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE). Just like teaching I never applied to get into CPCE. While teaching at St Phillip’s, Ms Ruth Persico was my headmistress. Her sister Ms Jean Persico was the President of the Guyana Teachers Union. I later learnt that one day, Ruth Persico told her sister Jean Persico she has a good young man in her school but he needed training and she wanted him to go to training college. Jean Persico did what she had to do.”
By that time, Esseboom, who was born in Springlands, Corentyne, and who had moved to the city when he was 15 years old had been there for just over three years. “I didn’t know where the CPCE was. My pastor who was from East Coast Demerara knew and he took me to Turkeyen. I enjoyed my stay at CPCE. It was one of the best things that ever happened to me. I think I was designed by God for teaching. For me it is the best job in the world.”
After graduating, Esseboom was sent to St Stephen’s Primary. After five years, he left and taught part time at Central High School and Brickdam Secondary. He subsequently became a permanent staff member at Central High.
“It was at Central that I found my niche as a school teacher. I remember Central High very fondly. I am so intertwined with Central that when students have their annual reunion they invite me. I have to tell then I was never a student at Central High. At Central I realized the more mature the students were the better I performed as a teacher. So when I went to UG to teach, I really had a blast because it confirmed that the more mature the students were the better I became at my craft.”
While he misses teaching in the school system, he said, as a pastor he still teaches.
“I think my years in the secular system, the skills, the insights and the methods in teaching I acquired, really prepared me for what I am doing as a pastor. All those things I learnt before I started pastoring.”
Esseboom spent a decade tutoring and lecturing at the Centre of Communication Studies. He recalled being recruited by Dr Andrew Hicks, who was at his church and just after the service had ended told him the centre needed someone of his calibre.
“Wanda Chesney was heading it. We talked and eventually I was retained. I stayed there until 2017. It really impacted on me working with the likes of Professor Paloma Mohamed. I learned quite a lot.”
Born in Springlands, Corentyne, Esseboom attended Skeldon Anglican Primary School up to fourth form where he wrote the College of Preceptors and excelled.
“I was to have gone to a secondary school but then I came to town to live. Most of my years I lived in Georgetown but I am from Corentyne. I have fond memories growing up there. I took part in athletics and gymnastics. Every year we used to put on a huge concert at the school. I was always a part of the athletic and gymnastic and cricket teams representing the school. By the time I started to enjoy that part of my life, I came to Georgetown and things were different.”
The eldest of the five children, Esseboom learned a lot of domestic skills from a very young age.
“I had to shepherd the others. If mommy and daddy were not at home, I was in charge. I was cooking by the time I was eight years old. It is one of the things I like doing. I used to tell my mother, ‘No woman is going to make styles on me because I could do absolutely everything for myself. I am a thoroughly domesticated male. Nowadays if you are too domesticated people believe you are gay. Growing up, a male learning to cook and do housework was normal. Almost everything a woman can do in the house I can do. However, I didn’t learn to make roti and dhal puri.”
When his family moved to the city, his mother sold snacks at the then South Georgetown Secondary School. “I used to help her make mittai, plantain chips and other things to sell. When it comes to cooking I am very comfortable in the kitchen.”
His father taught bookkeeping and was a boiler at Skeldon sugar factory and his mother did mostly domestic work.
Joining the media
In the early 1990s Esseboom obtained a bacheor’s degree in mass communications from UG. Sometime in 1995, while travelling in a car he heard an advertisement on radio during the midday news for an information officer at the Office of the President. He applied and was successful.
“That’s how I got my break in the media. At the time the late President Cheddi Jagan was in office. I started working at the GIS (Guyana Information Services).”
His mentors included Dr Rovin Deodat, the late Oudit Ram, Lloyd Conway. “Mr Conway was an absolute maestro as an editor. Later on when I left there and went to the (Guyana) Chronicle I met with the late George Baird, another absolute great editor. I learnt a lot from Mr Baird and Mr Conway. Sometimes I sit and thank God that I was able to pass through some really, really good hands. I think I was a better than average student. Mr Conway was tough but in retrospect I was happy for the toughness because it really shaped me to be better than what I thought I would have been.”
Esseboom was also the Guyana correspondent for the Caribbean Media Corporation for several years.
He also did some public relations for former minister of Public Health Volda Lawrence. Lawrence was one of his early converts in the late eighties.
“I am still involved in journalism. I still got bills to pay. Most of my pastoring is voluntary and I have been working and pastoring full time. Since I was 17 years old I was doing multiple jobs. There was hardly a time I was only doing one thing. The salary was terrible anyway so a lot of the times I was teaching and always earning on the side. When I got married and got children I always needed an extra income to supplement my salary,” he said.
