Oluatoyin Alleyne

“I see her come out the office in a flood of tears and is like me heart just go out to her and I had to stop she and ask she wah happen.

Beverly Pile still remembers the day as if it were yesterday.

“Yes so…,” and then she was silent for a few seconds, or longer.

Over five years after she secured a court order, which deemed a move by the government to have her blacklisted unlawful, a young professional is forced to produce the original document as well as a photocopy every time she is about to leave the country; today she is angry that those who failed to correct the unconstitutional act are now crying foul.

It has been almost a year since that brutal attack that took her daughter’s life and left her with a lasting injury on her left hand, and Bibi Shameela’s constant wish is that she could turn back time and offer more protection to her daughter who had fled an abusive husband.

She is in her thirties, but still timid around her parents and older relatives.

Seventeen years ago Leonie Edwards was a woman with many children, who was controlled by her husband and who could not read.

“Mother’s Day is always a struggle for me because people believe I am not a mother.

At 21 Rebekah Saleem was newly married and pregnant, and just when she thought life couldn’t get any better she was told she was carrying twin girls.

“I can’t sit down. I just have to get up, I have to get up and get.

She was just 16 and he was 22 when he visited her home and ‘asked home’ for her (a term used in Guyana to describe when a man requests a woman’s hand in marriage through her parents).

The first column on January 29, featured the experience of a battered woman’s struggle in dealing with a system that is not friendly towards women like her and dealing with her husband whose only intent is for her to return to their matrimonial home.

A 27-year-old mother of three is decrying the justice system she believes failed her two young daughters, after a relative was freed of charges of sexually assaulting them, by Magistrate Clive Nurse, who dismissed the matters on May 4.

Her father was involved in a misunderstanding with a relative, which was about to get violent.

Her heart set on black pudding with ‘loud sour,’ Guyanese Heather Chin, journeyed 50 miles from her Texas, US home only to be told that there was not enough pudding to sell.

“It is a daily struggle, some days are good but others like you don’t get no sale.

  Single mom Rosanne Farley thought she was prepared for parenthood until her world was thrown into disarray when her daughter was diagnosed with mild to moderate autism.

“Raising a girl child is not easy I tell you. Is like sometimes you wish they would be the same little baby girl because when they turn teenager is another ball game,” the frank words of a mother of a teenage daughter, who according to her has been giving her the “time of my life.”

A chance sample-taking of “dutty water” led by an eccentric science teacher, propelled Lorna McPherson to rewarding experiences in the world of science; she is still to exit more than 50 years later and if given a chance she would do it all over again.

“You think it easy? Let me tell you, the force stinks and if you don’t get a head on you shoulder it will destroy you, tek wah I telling you,” she said forcefully, her face contorting in the process.