By Miranda La Rose
The Jarvis sisters, Grace, 48, Julietta 46, and Emma 43, were all early school leavers. They all also left home before attaining the age of majority. However, through perseverance they are now beauticians and owners of the Triple J’s Beauty Glow Salon, making a name for themselves in the city.
Originally from Arikowa Creek in the Waini River in Region One (Barima-Waini), the Jarvis sisters spent their early childhood learning from the beauty and dangers of the forests, rivers and creeks with their flora and fauna in an area that is today still virtually pristine.
“With all we have achieved, we never took a loan from the bank. It was not an easy road. We saved together and invested together. The togetherness is what made us survive. The three of us stuck together. Our sister Marcia worked with us for a few months and one of my nephews was with us in the beginning but he had a different clientele and we separated,” Julietta Jarvis told Stabroek Weekend in an interview that included her sisters Grace and Emma at Triple J’s in Robb Street, Bourda, Georgetown.
To younger women who do not have a sound educational background, Emma Jarvis said, “Learn a trade. A trade will help you to finance furthering your education.”
They were all born at the then Acquero Health Centre in Santa Rosa Village, Moruca, Region One. A few weeks after their birth they were taken to Arikowa Creek where their late father, Jerry Jarvis was initially engaged in logging.
The sisters grew up between Santa Rosa Village, where they attended Santa Rosa Primary School (SRPS), and the Waini River, where they learned to paddle boats, swim, farm, hunt and where they escaped several near death events by water and wild animals.
Grace was six years old when she started school. She remembered when her father enrolled the four older of seven siblings at Warapoka Primary School. Grace was the youngest enrolled.
The first day they were sent to school at Warapoka, Grace said, they left home early in the morning. They paddled along the Waini River but did not find the school. Their father then took them to SRPS where initially they stayed with their grandparents Joe and Isabella Jarvis aka ‘Grandma Busy’ at Cabucalli, Santa Rosa Village before their father built a house next door to their grandparents’. Later on, they moved to the Kumaka Ballfield area where their father built another house and where their mother now resides.
Julietta started school at five years old and Emma at six years old.
“If school closed a Friday, the next day we travelled to Waini. At first we paddled in a ballahoo. We’d leave Santa Rosa between 8 pm to 9 pm, sleep at about midnight at a camp then continue the next day to arrive at Arikowa Creek about 10 am,” Juliet recalled.
Later on. their means of transportation improved to a Seagull and a five horse-power outboard engine which was placed on a ballahoo, the sisters recalled jokingly.
Living in Waini was mostly fun but in between they had some adventurous and challenging experiences resulting from floods and drought, Emma said.
“Everything was fresh. We never ate anything like salted fish. We had a grant on which we farmed. We had corn, dasheen, eddoes, tania, plantains, all of the nice stuff that we have to spend so much money for now. We played a lot in the trees. We fished. We hunted,” she said.
The grant was surrounded by drainage canals and Grace recalled almost drowning in one of them.
“We roasted fish and corn when we went to the farm. We got fresh fish like morocut, blinker, fresh water basha and allaka and kewe,” she said. Allaka are small edible snails and the kewe are the bigger ones which were found by the hundreds on the roots of the mangroves.
Their mother, of Wapichan and Macushi origin, is from Achiwib in the Rupununi while their father was of Arawak, African, Spanish and Portuguese origin. Their father worked away from home most of the time and the children were left in Arikowa alone with their mother for several weeks at a time. Their neighbours were miles away and few.
Resettling
Grace left school at 14 years old and shortly after moved to Georgetown. When she left SRPS, the headmaster recommended that she continue her education at the secondary level because of her good grades at the Secondary Schools Proficiency Examinations.
However, she said, father told her, “We got a big farm. We got to plant peanuts.”
She said she told her older sister Susan that she did not want to plant peanuts. She wanted to go to Georgetown but she knew no one in the city. She travelled to Georgetown with a recruiter to do domestic work; it was not what she expected.
“When I came to town I did housework and I didn’t like that. I did it because I had to survive. I had to pay rent and eat,” she related.
Two years later, she was working as a waitress in a restaurant when she was reunited with Julietta in an unexpected encounter on Barr Street, Kitty. Julietta was staying in South Ruimveldt, and needed a job. Grace found her a job in the restaurant where she worked.
Settling in Georgetown was not easy, Julietta said, “It was scarier than the jungles in Waini, Baramani or Biara.”
At 14 years old, she said, “I was actually expelled from school.”
The headmaster sent her home for hitting a boy twice in his stomach after he had wrongfully accused her of tugging at his ear and had hit her in her stomach. The headmaster had threatened “to bench” her in front of the school and she retorted. She was told not to return to school unless she took her parents. She went home and told her parents what had happened, but did not return to school.
Shortly after, she left Moruca for Georgetown and first worked as a domestic worker. After six months, she was told she was not cut out for domestic work and to get another job.
At home in Moruca, housework was always shared among the siblings.
“I never liked farm work, but I had to do it. That was one of the reasons I came to town. I also came because my mother had agreed for me to get married at 16 years and I didn’t want to,” she related. When Juliet and Grace reunited, they rented “a very small bedroom” on the ground floor of a rundown apartment building in Thomas Street, South Cummingsburg that was subjected to flooding.
When Susan joined the two sisters in the city, they rented a bigger room but had no beds.
“We slept on the floor but it was safer than where we were before; we were all bringing in an income,” Grace said.
Then Grace became pregnant at 21 years old. After the child’s birth they rented a one-bedroom apartment with a kitchen. “We bought small pieces of furniture and household appliances, upgrading our living standards all the time,” she said.
When their father visited and learnt that Grace had a child he advised her to return to Moruca to her mother to help her. She went back after seven years but found things were more difficult, so she returned to Georgetown with her son on a flight offered to her by then TUF presidential candidate Manzoor Nadir.
Fitness
Returning to work at the restaurant initially, Grace worked during the day and Julietta did the afternoon/evening shifts.
“We look out for each other even though we row and have our differences,” Julietta said.
Emma chipped in, “We’re strong not only mentally but also physically. Exercise was a mental flame for us. We couldn’t afford to go to a gym but we walked where we found open spaces, in the National Park and on the seawall.”
At 16 years old, Julietta joined a gym. Grace joined a gym at 22 years old after she had her first son.
Grace, Julietta and Emma joined Caribs Rugby Football Club in 2005. At the try out they were impressive.
According to Emma, “We featured in the first Guyana Book in 2005.”
Emma liked rugby but fell down a stairway and injured her back which ruled her out of the game.
Grace became a national women’s rugby player in 2007, a year after she broke her right leg.
“I stayed away from rugby for a year. My dad told me I would return stronger when I recovered and he was right,” she said.
After retiring from rugby, Grace joined Emma at karate. When the Covid-19 pandemic hit a brother-in-law invited her to judo. She later represented Guyana at judo in a tournament in Suriname where she placed third in her category. From judo she moved to jujitsu. Now she is into powerlifting. In August last year at 47 years old, she won her first competition in the powerlifting master’s 1 category.
“In August I am going back again. Juliet is also a karateka and lifting weights,” she added.
Beauty business
Julietta laid the foundation for her sisters to follow in the cosmetology industry. According to her sisters Julietta was always dressing them up and she continued doing this in Georgetown. Someone noticed her style of make-up and hairdressing and suggested she enrol in a cosmetology school. At the time, she did not know there was such a school.
By this time, she had begun to take Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate classes and other educational opportunities she found. She enrolled at a cosmetology school in January 1999 and graduated in January 2000. After graduating, she worked in a salon for six months where she found her niche in cutting hair. “Everywhere I worked I pushed myself,” Julietta said.
It was while she was in cosmetology school that she enrolled in karate classes. “I didn’t continue with rugby like my sisters,” she noted.
She then joined one of the top salons in the city, where she worked for four years, and learnt from some of other beauticians who had overseas training. While at that salon, she went to Trinidad and Tobago where she worked in a salon for three months.
“In Trinidad I realised I could do this on my own in Guyana and I don’t have to work for anyone,” she said.
The year before she went to Trinidad she had gotten a job for Emma where she had worked.
When Julietta returned to Guyana, Emma was still working where she left her, but Julietta rented a chair at a small salon in New Market Street. Her former clients started returning for her to cut their hair.
Then Emma was fired for allegedly sending clients to Julietta and Julietta suggested they work together, save as much of their earnings and rent their own space.
“That Christmas we worked late into the nights,” she said. They earned enough to pay for the rental of a small place in upper Quamina Street. “That was the beginning of Triple J’s,” Julietta said.
Emma
Emma said when she came to the city at 16 years old, she had no skills. She was employed by a diamond dealer who taught her how to buy diamonds.
When the dealer left the country she did not know what to do. Shortly after, at 19 years old, she became pregnant and she needed a job.
“I became pregnant in February and my fiancé and I were supposed to get married in June. I found him cheating and I walked away from that relationship while pregnant,” she recalled.
After the baby was born her ex-fiancé wanted custody of the child. She was unemployed. To prove she was capable of looking after the child she found a domestic job.
“At the same time, Juliet was encouraging me to go to cosmetology school,” she said
With the help of her sisters, who took turns in looking after the children, Emma started classes in cosmetology.
On completing the course, she worked at a salon where her employer gave her a mannequin to improve her blow-drying skills. “If she didn’t push me, I would not have gained the experiences I got. She’d told me the mannequin head was expensive and to take care of it. A day I was washing the head and the hair became entangled. I cut out the hair and I left the job because I was afraid to tell her what happened,” she related.
Then another beautician offered Emma a pedicure job which she did for a year. Then Juliet who was still working elsewhere told Emma she had saved up enough money for them to open their own place.
“This was in 1999/2000. Juliet had begun buying some things little by little. I had a young child. Juliet said we would open up within three months’ time and I would have to resign. I don’t know who told my boss that we were opening a salon. She fired me before I could tell her. That pushed us faster to open the salon in East Street where we all lived at the time,” she recalled.
The year they were on their own, Juliet, the expert at cutting, became pregnant.
Emma said, “I couldn’t cut. Once, I clipped the skin of an ear of one of our customers. When I told him what I had done, all he said was, ‘That’s okay. It’s just blood.’”
However, shortly after the World Trade Center terrorist attack in 2001, the sisters found that their business was struggling. “We closed down and went our separate ways,” Emma said.
Juliet found employment with one of the top salons in the city and Emma was employed at a daycare centre. The centre recommended that Emma do the two-year early childhood education upgrading programme for entry to the Cyril Potter College of Education (CPCE) which she completed. She was due to start studies at CPCE the following year.
“I was struggling to make ends meet and Juliet suggested I get back in the beauty business. I didn’t want to leave the daycare, but I could not survive on the money I was earning. Teachers love what they do but most times they have another support system in place. I had no one else but my sisters. I left the daycare job and went back to hairdressing where Julietta worked,” she said.
Then Julietta left for Trinidad and when she returned she rented a chair to start her own business. Emma said, “I was accused of sending clients to Juliet and they fired me again because of her. Working at the same place with Juliet I had to share a chair with my nephew, a barber. Sometimes he had a client and I had a client and no chair. It was inconveniencing.”
They pooled their resources together and got a place in upper Quamina Street. The chair Julietta had bought for East Street was put back in use and they bought another chair. The first chair is at the current location along with the first mirror she bought.
Their sister Susan who now resides in the United Kingdom bought them an air-conditioning unit.
Business was blooming until the Covid-19 pandemic occurred in 2020. That year, their landlord sold the building and the new owner gave them three months to find another place.
It was back to East Street where their customers found them.
In East Street, Grace worked with her sisters. “They paid me $4,500 a week. It was something because I didn’t have a job after I returned from Moruca. Emma taught me what she learnt from the beauty school and what she gained along the way,” Grace said.
One day, Grace invited one of her affluent friends for a pedicure. The woman subsequently opened a business and offered to pay her $10,000 a week as a sales clerk to sell gold and silver jewelry and beauty products. “That was more money than my sisters were paying me and I got two children to feed,” she said. She took the position.
During that time, Grace was on the national women’s rugby team and Saturday was a busy day for the business. She had to be granted time off from 4 pm to train on Saturdays. She travelled with the team periodically. However, when she was picked for the national side to play in Mexico, her employer told her she could not have an employee who was travelling because it affected her business. She was fired after five years.
She then became a babysitter for the wife of one of her rugby coaches with whom she worked with for six years until they migrated.
Her sisters, who were working in their own space in lower Quamina Street and living in their own homes, employed her. Grace eventually went to a cosmetology school and has since graduated.
At the time she rejoined her sisters they had secured the contract for the pageant for Amerindian Heritage Month. “They said come and wash hair. That first day I washed hair till my back got round,” she joked.
From Quamina Street, they moved to Robb Street where they now operate.
While the sisters joked about the challenges in their lives from their early childhood and transitioning to city life, what shone through was their discipline, dedication and determination.
