Annan Boodram, 66, a New York-based activist and advocate for the prevention of suicide and other social ills and a former school teacher, is using his life’s experiences to bring about positive changes in behaviour through mental health awareness, having courted suicide ideations himself.
Coordinator of the non-profit organisation Caribbean Voice, Boodram, who did not know he was suffering from depression when he was suicidal, told the Stabroek Weekend, “I was driven to get involved in suicide prevention because of my brother who suicided, another brother who had attempted suicide three times and losing an aunt to suicide. I myself had been suicidal more than once.”
Most of the advocates and activists of Caribbean Voice who do the ground work, he said, “vicariously experienced domestic violence or sexual abuse or suicidal ideation or have lost family members to suicide.”
If he knew then what he knows now, he said, his brother would not have suicided. “In retrospect, I made the same mistakes and did the same things, we as activists tell people they shouldn’t do. I lacked all the requisite qualities: empathy, understanding, all the right language,” he added.
Discrimination, alcoholism and poverty to a lesser extent contributed to him being suicidal. When he started teaching at 17 years old, after completing his General Certificate of Education (GCE) Advanced Level examinations, Boodram was one of two Berbice High School graduates assigned to the Lower Corentyne Secondary. The other was the daughter of a senior education official who, he said, was less qualified than him based on their A-Level results. At the end of that term, the school had an excess of teachers and one person had to go. The senior education official’s daughter was kept on the job and Boodram was dismissed. He felt disadvantaged and discriminated against. He got a job at JC Chandisingh Secondary where he taught for two terms before settling down at Central Corentyne Secondary.
While teaching at JC Chandisingh in 1973, Boodram was introduced to alcohol. “In those days, male teachers did two things, they taught and frequented the rum shops,” he said. One day the male teachers invited him for a drink. He said did not drink alcohol. “They said that was okay. Then one guy placed a bottle of beer in front of me and said if I didn’t drink, I would have to pay for the drinks that he was going to buy that day,” he recalled. “Until today I don’t know if he was joking or not, but I didn’t have that kind of money. I had just started teaching, so of course I drank. After that I wasn’t an addict but I was an alcoholic of sorts. The first week after I drew my first salary, it was finished because the bulk of it went for rum I bought. I ended up with more debt and being drunk most of the time.”
Many years later it dawned on Boodram that he got drunk to escape. “My depressing reality was always being broke and teaching for a salary that was very small,” he said. “At one time I was living as a bachelor and that was the period I became suicidal. If I didn’t have a strong willpower, I probably would have suicided. Even in the darkness of the recesses of my mind, I always thought that my life was worth something more and some sort of successes and achievements were awaiting me in the future. My drinking got so bad it was reflecting on my parents, my family and all the activities I was involved in.”
At the time he was an active member of the Progressive Youth Organisation and the People’s Progressive Party in Alness. He was the secretary of the mandir and the chairman of the Central Corentyne branch of the Dharmic Sabha.
“My parents nagged me to stop drinking and did things that drove me further into alcoholism,” he said. “Just like how I didn’t know how to handle my alcoholic brother who had suicided, they didn’t know how to handle my behaviour and my alcoholism. I suffered depression but I didn’t know then what it was. It was only when I got involved in this fight for the prevention of suicide that I knew I was not only depressed but I lived with depression all those years because of poverty and stymied social advancement. I had done well at high school but I was stuck in teaching after so many years.”
After 14 years of being constantly inebriated, Boodram took stock of his life. “Somehow, I was able to summon the willpower.”
On his birthday, 12th January, 1987 he held a ‘havan’ (a Hindu purification ritual) for his birthday. He bought a bottle of vodka and invited one of his brothers and a friend. He told them that was the last alcoholic drink he was going to take.
“From then to now I took half of a can of beer. I took it to stop my friends, who had migrated to the US, from nagging me at a reunion I had organised for them,” he said.
He has walked the depression route, suicide ideation, alcoholism and domestic violence. “I have walked these journeys in a personal way and they have driven me to become this activist and advocate against them all,” he said.
He recalled a day after he had finished high school, when his father grabbed a stick to beat his mother as he would do if he was annoyed with her or if they had an argument. Boodram held onto it, not allowing his father to beat his mother. After that, his father did not beat her as often, especially when the children were around.
Boodram became involved in activism and advocacy in 2014 while he was suspended from teaching because of allegations levelled against him by a student at the middle school where he taught in New York.
While he was awaiting the outcome of his case in ‘a rubber room’ (a place where teachers awaiting hearings were placed) and doing nothing, he became aware of the World Health Organisation report that Guyana had the world’s highest suicide rate. Boodram started to communicate online with other people including a doctor in anger management and a mental health nurse about the situation in Guyana. He wanted to help as he had been suicidal.
Boodram, the doctor and nurse decided to do a content analysis of the media in Guyana to see how they were treating with suicide and domestic violence. “It wasn’t significant,” he said.
Caribbean Voice
Instead of incorporating a new entity, Boodram suggested the use of Caribbean Voice, a registered non-profit organisation he and a group had launched in 1994 for a Caribbean magazine which was transformed into a newspaper and subsequently folded.
It should be noted that in recent years, the Caribbean Voice magazine was relaunched as an online quarterly and now has a readership of about 100,000.
The suicide prevention campaign was launched in 2014. In 2015 Caribbean Voice held its first conference in Guyana at a cost of US$5,000 which was funded by its members and supporters.
“Initially, we focused on a suicide prevention campaign but we concluded that to address suicide, we had to address some, if not all of the factors that impact suicide. There is a dynamic interrelationship between suicide and domestic violence, suicide and sexual abuse and to a lesser extent suicide and child abuse. We expanded our coverage to include all forms of abuse. We are also dealing with substance abuse, animal abuse and environmental abuse,” he related.
Caribbean Voice has counselled for free over 1,500 people from over 25 countries. “Most of our counselling has been with Guyanese and we have never lost anyone of our cases to suicide,” Boodram said.
The organisation’s structure includes activists and advocates, a technical team of qualified counsellors, a team of spokesmen, and a team of consultants. Its programme includes suicide prevention songs and video messages for sensitisation and information. It has organised fund-raising concerts across the US and in Guyana.
“The Caribbean Voice is voluntary driven and its members run their own non-governmental organisations in Caribbean countries as well as the US, Canada and the United Kingdom. We work with them,” he said.
Caribbean Voice is at present lobbying for decriminalising suicide in Caribbean countries. Guyana is one of the few countries that has decriminalised suicide. The campaign is being done in collaboration with the Global Mental Health Network and the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
For the past two years, the organisation has hosted periodic panel discussions bringing together activists, advocates, people with lived experiences and experts to focus on mental health issues.
Last year, it sponsored a leading regional toxicologist to facilitate a workshop in Guyana on how to save the life of someone within the first few hours of ingesting poison. The workshop targeted key stakeholders including the Guyana Sugar Corporation and the National Agricultural, Research and Extension Institute among others.
Background, teaching
Boodram, a husband and father, was born in Alness Village, East Berbice/Corentyne.
He is one of six siblings. He attended Alness Primary, then Manchester Secondary where he wrote GCE Ordinary Levels and Berbice High School. He taught in Guyana until 1987, mainly at Central Corentyne Secondary, Bush Lot, JC Chandisingh, Lower Corentyne Secondary and Annandale Secondary to enable him to work and attend classes at the University of Guyana where he spent a year before migrating to the US in 1991.
In New York, he obtained a bachelor’s degree in mass communications from City College and a master’s degree in education from Mercy College. He taught in the New York education system from 2002 to 2017.
Boodram started teaching middle school in February 2006 in the barrios in New York, which is populated by mainly immigrants from the Hispanic communities in Latin America and experienced a culture shock.
“Cursing, the unruly behaviour of students, so many things were strange to me coming from a country where the whole school system, classroom behaviour and everything was different,” he recalled
Many students were first generation and some second generation Hispanics who were socially and economically disadvantaged.
“Language was also a barrier for me. Some students came from broken homes, lived in homes that were inhabited by drug pushers, drug users, the violence that went with that and teenage pregnancy. There were lots of dysfunctional families with, in many cases, grandparents raising the children because of absentee parents,” he said.
When he returned home after his first day, he tried to remember where he had put his security guard licence, as he was thinking of going back to what he had done while he was in college.
Starting in the middle of the school year, Boodram had no class or programme. In September, at the start of the new school year he was given a class and programme.
By December, when teachers were having problems with their students, their students were placed in his class.
Coming from Guyana where for 17 years, corporal punishment was the only thing he knew to maintain discipline in the classroom, in the US he had to adapt to manage a classroom without corporal punishment. He developed communication links with parents, rewards for those who did the things that were expected, hosted parties for his students and followed some of the recommendations of education experts.
Boodram said some of his students questioned what they were going to do with a certificate after leaving school. “They don’t see professional role models in their communities so the teacher in the classroom becomes a role model. If you are a male, you also become a sort of surrogate father for the young men who live in homes without fathers. I had to build an environment that met the needs of all children. It was not a one size fits all unlike Guyana where, more or less, it’s a one size fits all,” he claimed.
When given an honours class to teach for the first time, Boodram said his students set a number of academic records that have not been broken since.
He was then given a class of about 20 at-risk students. “The school never had a class of at-risk students before. By the end of the school year, every child had passed and moved onto another class and all had passed the standardised English and Mathematics tests. Some had been repeaters and many had failed the standardised tests,” he said.
In the process of developing his teaching skills, Boodram said, he developed empathy. “However, I didn’t know it was empathy until I got involved in suicide prevention,” he said.
In spite of his efforts, Boodram said, there were two instances where children made complaints against him. One child claimed he had hit him with a chair, but the child later admitted to lying so the case was dismissed.
A few years later, another child alleged that Boodram sexually harassed her.
On his return to school from the mid-winter break in February he was told to pack up and leave because a student had made some allegations against him.
Some 17 charges were levelled against him. “At the end of the case, all but one of the allegations were thrown out. I was found guilty of misconduct which was not specified. I was asked to pay a fine but I wasn’t fired,” he said.
Given the green light by the court to return to teaching, Boodram taught for two more years but because of the indictment he could not return to the middle school he previously taught at.
“The principal of the new school made things very difficult for me. In 2017 the Department of Education offered teachers a buyout and I took it,” he said.
