Miranda La Rose

After the COVID-19 pandemic brought a screeching halt to their gigs in clubs and other party venues, deejays like Guyana-born Gerald ‘Jerry’ Aaron have found new audiences and communities through online streaming.

Although he recently played his last football tournament, if Vurlon Mills has his way he will able to help future generations use the sport to transform their lives.

Candace Phillips wears many hats. The product development manager at the Guyana Tourism Authority (GTA) is an advocate for tourism development, Indigenous peoples and women, and also a mother.

Near the end of April last year, shortly after she tested positive for COVID-19, Lolita Rebeiro was diagnosed with cancer.

Growing up at La Grange, West Bank Demerara, empowerment advocate, Amar Panday wanted to help people to develop themselves so they in turn could help others.

Three weeks of communal activities steeped in both traditional and modern practices, including hunting, fishing, dancing and singing, herald Christmas festivities each year in the Indigenous community of Parabara.

As the world was still trying to come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic last year, Odela Joseph unexpectedly launched a skincare business.

Just over a month after he was fired in August 2020 from the job he previously held for four years with the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport by the incoming government, Allister Klein Collins, 39, opened his own firm to practice as a Justice of the Peace and Commissioner of Oaths to Affidavits.

When the now fledgling Women’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry Guyana (WCCIG) was launched, its recently elected president Rowena Elliot was skeptical.

Thirty-eight years ago, former diver Dion De Souza and a ‘sailor’ were lost in the forested and wet highlands of the Cuyuni/Mazaruni region without food and shelter.

Advocacy, volunteerism, youth work, television production and engagement in a number of extracurricular activities including sports and culture in her youth, prepared Andrea Bryan-Garner for the challenges of giving hope to herself and a group of mothers of children born with multiple disabilities following the Zika virus outbreak in January 2016.

Congenital heart disease limited his physical activities in childhood, but after he had open heart surgery at 17 to correct a hole in his heart, nothing stopped Guyana-born Naraindra Prashad.

Maydha Persaud, 69, retired headmaster and teacher of Abram Zuil Secondary School, is this year marking 50 years in the teaching profession, and now teaching mainly students seeking a second chance at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC), even though he retired from the formal education system 14 years ago.

As an eight-year-old, Beverly Ann McFarlane killed mosquitos at every opportunity she got, placed them into match boxes, counted and examined them—a harbinger of what lay ahead for the now microscopist.

The love for volunteerism and humanitarian work has propelled Ewin Enmore, 39, into becoming an administrator with the Guyana Red Cross Society (GRCS) and the President’s Youth Award Republic of Guyana (PYARG).

From school days to adulthood, Mahendra Sookraj’s love for planting and animal husbandry have helped him to initially stave off hunger, then to feed his family, to earn an income apart from whatever else he did, in order to build his own home and to live a comfortable and fulfilling life to date, while still helping others. 

Maybe it was swimming morning, noon and afternoon at Acquero Landing, in Region One, or running the dam linking Huradiah with Acquero alongside siblings and cousins, or dashing across the savannahs during the dry season and then swimming the Moruca River to get to Cabucalli.

Self-taught musician and leader of the Couchman Family Band, 66-year-old Leon Couchman is hoping that music produced locally could attract corporate sponsorship in order to preserve Indigenous and other Guyanese rhythms as he has lost much of his own compositions because of production, copyright and sponsorship issues.

Coming from Koriabo, a riverain Warrau community of no more than 200 people at the time “with very limited access to education” in the Mabaruma sub-region, Myra Pierre-Moore, 51, the Learning Resource Development Officer at the National Centre for Educational Resource Development (NCERD) says that as a child she never dreamt she would become the educator and professional she is today.

United States-based Guyanese Suresh Sugrim, 60, lived as an illegal immigrant for ten years in the US and ten years after he became a US resident, as a pandit, he formed the New Jersey Arya Samaj (NJAS) which gave birth to the Humanitarian Mission (Guyana) Inc (HMI) in Port Mourant, Corentyne in 2005.