Groenveldt

Pupils of Leonora Primary pose for a photo. From left are Delon, Jamesha, Darshanie and Leron
Pupils of Leonora Primary pose for a photo. From left are Delon, Jamesha, Darshanie and Leron

Home to some 500 people, Groenveldt, on the West Coast Demerara, is sandwiched between Leonora and Edinburgh and is believed to have existed since the late 19th century.

Groenveldt was once referred to as Wine Bush because of the proliferation of bushes bearing tiny purple-coloured berries, known locally as ‘baby jamoon,’ which grew wild in the area. The people who lived in the nearby village, it was said, would gather these berries to make wine. This tasty beverage, made mostly at Christmas time, was greatly anticipated in the bygone days.

It was afternoon when I visited, and people milled around the streets stopping to chat with friends and neighbours. It was easy to ask for directions as everyone knew everyone.

School was out for the day and excited children ran about the Leonora Primary School compound, at first thought to be situated in Groenveldt. Some stood outside on the bridge awaiting their parents. Although the sign on the road said Groenveldt on one side and Leonora on the other, residents said that on the opposite side which any stranger would consider Groenveldt because of the sign was actually Leonora Pasture. Leonora has several sections, it was said, and Groenveldt is one of them.

Through Third Street, Auntie Devi, as she is fondly known, was setting up a little table at the side of the road opposite a small shop to sell her plantain and cassava chips.

At the shop, 89-year-old Bissoondial sat in his rocking chair, reading a newspaper. He is the oldest resident and was born in Groenveldt, though in another part closer to the road. Where he lives today was all bush and trees when he was a boy. His father, he said, arrived in Guyana at the age of ten with his parents, who were indentured servants, and a baby brother. They settled in Leonora. According to the man, his father came from Rajpur in India and at the time that name was also given to the section of Leonora where he and his family lived in a logie.

He said he learned from older folk then that the Groenveldt Estate used to be owned by two British men, Sandbach and Parker. “Long ago, the old people used to come and sit down one place and they would converse with each other. They would talk about India and issues here. Sometimes they would allow me to be around but if they got some private story to talk, they would tell me to move and go somewhere else. From what I hear, the British tell them how the place nice and that they would work for a lot of money,” Bissoondial said.

He was unable to recall the name of the school he attended but knew that he left at standard six. When he was 14 years old, he began applying for office jobs. His first job saw him working at a general store in Uitvlugt. However, he was laid off at the end of crop and told he could return during crop season. However, by the time that came, he had started another job. That did not last long and for most of his life he ended up working as a carpenter, building homes and coffins.

One of the struggles Bissoondial and his wife had to face recently was the disconnection of their water in 2014. According to the man, he was paying his water bill until he turned a pensioner and at that time, during the previous administration, pensioners did not have to pay for water. Though he was a pensioner long before 2014, his water was suddenly disconnected.

Nearby, his 79-year-old wife, Gomattie, nodded her head and added that it was because they had a black tank and a reservoir that they were able to make it. Over the past five years, they have accumulated a total of five tanks, she said. Nowadays, even during the dry season, they have enough water that they collect during the rainy season to manage. According to the woman, the Guyana Water Inc (GWI) had sent them a bill for $75,000, when they owed nothing.

Bissoondial showed me a letter he has written to the GWI that he plans on posting soon. Although they have the tanks, they believe they should have the same convenience as other pensioners when it comes to access to potable water.

Bissoondial spends his day reading the newspapers and writing while Gomattie attends to their house and the shop.

Making ends meet

Beneath one of the handsome trees lining Front Street, Groenveldt, there was a bench, an old fridge, a chair and Khemchand Singh. “I was born at Endeavour, Leguan Island,” he told me. “I was about five/six years when I move here with my family. I am 66 now.

“I can recall in the early sixties when I had just come here to live, they had started construction on the Leonora Primary School over there. That school was built through self-help. My father was working there… my uncle used to come and help too. I used to help too… bring nails for them or whatever they wanted. At that time, I used to attend Stewartville Primary. The school doesn’t exist anymore.”

When he was young, Singh said, the village had only two streets, both fully occupied. And while due to migration or death many of the early families are no longer there, the community now has seven streets. Five were added as a result of people squatting there in the 1960s.

A pensioner now, Singh worked most of his life – 40 years – transporting the public in his minibus. Now retired, he spends most of his time in his kitchen garden, which he said provides for his family: his wife, son and his grandson. His wife does not work and has not yet attained the age of 65 to qualify for old-age pension. The kitchen garden supplements Singh’s meagre pension and what his son earns as a security guard, but it is difficult for the family to make ends meet.

The employment rate in the area, Singh said, is relatively low and for him it is a sore sight to see the youths idling. The only time some of them can get work is during the crop season but otherwise they do nothing.

‘How I learn to swim’

Heeralall Persaud was visiting his mother. He had lived in Groenveldt for 20+ years before settling in another section of Leonora, where he has been living for the past 19 years. “I was eight or nine years old when we move here from Leonora Pasture. There was no road here; a few dams that was really bad [and] when the rain fall is sheer mud and big, big holes. We used to get a lot of flood here also,” he said.

“We used to use the dam across the [canal] where all the bush grown now to walk to go to school. The estate used to use that dam for transporting things with their tractor so that dam used to maintain and was very good so rather than walking in this mud, we’d walk to the koker at the end here and go across and use that dam and cross back over to this one side using the bridge at the other end. “We had one pipe on the road that everybody use to go and line up and wait to use to get water for cooking and using in the house but for bathing we used the mill-walk water. We would stand on the gath [a short bridge used for bathing and doing laundry] and dip the water or go swimming.”

Persaud believes it was because everyone had to bathe at the canal that many of the children then learned how to swim. He noted that today it is different because everything is done indoors and less people know to swim.

“How I learn to swim, I used a bucket that I had turned down into the water to avoid water getting in. That was used to keep me floating like the life jacket. You got to balance it, you can’t make water get inside because then you would go under,” he recalled. “This mill walk was very deep because the sugar barge used to pass through. The pontoons used to carry about 25 to 30 tonnes of sugar, so it had to be deep for the tractor to pull it for it to meet to the river. We had a few cases where children drowned. One case a mother was washing clothes and her five or six-year-old son was nearby, and he fell in and drowned.”

It is important, Persaud stressed, for persons to know to swim as it is a good life skill. Persaud is currently a first aider and is in the field with the other estate workers should any accidents happen. Anything beyond his control is referred to the doctors at the dispensary and can be referred again after that depending on how life threatening the matter is. Prior to becoming a first aider, he worked as a checker.

Living in Groenveldt, he said, is convenient because the schools are nearby, so are restaurants, the Leonora market, the police station, places of worship, the fire station and the hospital.

Persaud spoke of the days of the train, which ran from Vreed-en-Hoop to Parika, and he pointed out that there was a local and an express. It was a mode of transportation he had often used and recalled that on the last day the train ran, it was announced, and everyone was allowed to ride all day for free. This was an opportunity he did not miss.

A few vehicles ran then too; they took the old road. His father, when he was younger, took this road riding his bicycle 15 miles to Vreed-en-Hoop, from where he took the ferry across to Georgetown and rode again for eight and a half miles to Industry where he worked. At the end of each day, he rode a total of 47 miles.

Speaking about Groenveldt back in the day, Persaud said that the first man to squat beyond the two streets was called Stanley and people started calling the area Stanleytown, before they switched to ‘Shantytown,’ possibly because of the tiny shacks built in the squatting area. “Everybody then had squat houses, little zinc houses that measured to a ten by ten or a ten by twenty or whatever they could have afford,” he said. Today, the former ‘Shantytown’ has some of the most modern houses.