Career teacher stuck to education in spite of trauma and tragedy

Anisah Woolford-Saunders, her husband Joseph and son Jonathon
Anisah Woolford-Saunders, her husband Joseph and son Jonathon

It has been seven years and four pregnancies since Anisah Woolford-Saunders lost her unborn child when a bullet meant for the pursuers of a fleeing bandit struck her, sending her into months of physical pain.

Today she still battles with the emotional pain from time to time. But the teacher said she never lost sight of who she was or her main goal of educating the nation’s children. February 23, 2012 is a day she will never forget. She was preparing for her son Jonathon’s birthday party and was outside on her landing when a bullet pierced her four-month pregnant belly.

Her time in the hospital is still hazy. She was between the High Dependency Unit and the Intensive Care Unit at intervals; many of those days she was semi-conscious and in severe physical and emotional pain.

Anisah Woolford-Saunders in front of a blackboard

All of that came five years after a difficult birthing experience which resulted in her son Jonathon being born with effects of cerebral palsy. That was also a difficult time for her, as while she was grateful for her son she was at times angry and hurt because she did everything right, but the private doctor and hospital failed her. She was in labour for an entire night, temporarily lost consciousness at one time, yet no one has ever told her why a caesarean delivery was not done.

“My baby was blue when he was born,” she told Stabroek Weekend in a recent interview. “He spent two weeks in the incubator and was crying all the time. It was the lack of oxygen that caused him to have a slight trace of cerebral palsy.”

There are many ifs, but Woolford-Saunders tries not to dwell on these as she continues to explore ways and means to make life better for her son, whom, she said, is “much older than children his age.

Anisah Woolford-Saunders receiving a leadership certificate from the Caribbean Union of Teachers in Antigua, where she represented the Guyana Teachers’ Union.

“He is like an adult trapped in a child’s body,” she explained, while adding that her son is into politics, likes to watch the news and carries on healthy conversations.

And even as she deals with navigating the system to cater to the needs of her differently-abled son, the traumatic experience of losing her second child at the hands of a criminal and four miscarriages, Woolford-Saunders has persevered on the path she took 22 years ago of contributing to the education of Guyana’s children.

Now 41, the Plaisance resident and former student of Cummings Lodge Secondary School is deputy headmistress at the St Winifred Secondary School. She has taught at four schools during her long career, which is far from over, both at the secondary and primary levels.

“I find different ways in coping with it and even putting it behind me, all those various challenges, having a special child, having complications at birth, me being traumatized with a stray bullet even having work challenges too… But the thing about it, I have been able to conquer it because of determination. I am very determined. I have a determined spirit… whatever I want to do, and if I think it can help humanity, I go ahead and push beyond boundaries,” she said.

Stray bullet

Talking about February 23, 2012 is still difficult for Woolford-Saunders, but she recalled that there was a robbery in the neighbouring village of Better Hope on that day and the bandits were chased by villagers. One of them ended up in Victoria Road, Plaisance where she lives. That bandit was Danny Rajkumar, who later served time in prison for shooting Woolford-Saunders and other crimes including hijacking a car and robbery. She said she understands that he has since been released from prison.

“He fired the gun, not to shoot me directly, but to shoot whoever was trying to apprehend him… I was on my veranda and he fired off the gun. I saw him… and when he fired the gun the bullet came straight to my house and I felt a sting and I said, ‘Joe like I get shoot’. I looked down and I saw the blood coming out of my tummy…,” she said.

Woolford-Saunders said she was in a “bad state” in the hospital and it was a matter of life and death for her as at one time she contracted pneumonia and had to be rushed to the ICU. Her baby did not die immediately but later and then started becoming septic in her body. “So, it was really distressing. I had to do two surgeries,” she recalled.

“It was so frightening. It was an ordeal by itself and when I came out, the recovery stage was the worse for me… I was in a state where I had to wear diapers. I was in a state where I had to get counselling from the Georgetown Psychiatric Clinic.”

Woolford-Saunders recalled one day being taken to the clinic supported by her husband and her mother on either side and she remembered thinking that persons might have thought, “I was crazy and run away…”  But she said the counselling helped her a lot and at the time she was being assisted by a counsellor, Miss Yansen, who was also a teacher and who gave her even greater support.

Woolford-Saunders was away from teaching for three months and after she returned she still had to deal with attending court which she found “very harassing and traumatic”.

Rajkumar was charged but many of the witnesses, including two other women who were shot, were not attending court. She visited the police station on a number of occasions, asking if the witnesses could not be summoned.

Determined to have closure, Woolford-Saunders took matters into her own hands and with a colleague, Rodwell Lewis, she went looking for the witnesses and appealed to them to attend court as it was taking a lot out of her mentally.

“Although I had passed through the process of being able to move around, mentally I wasn’t there because it was like I wasn’t getting any closure…,” but she said during that period she also did a lot of reading which greatly assisted her.

Rajkumar was never charged with the death of her baby because it was unborn, but after his trials on the other charges, he was sentenced to a total of 16 years in prison.

“I felt like there was an injustice just hearing that he was sentenced to two years for my matter compared with hijacking a car… and knowing the ordeal that I went through with losing a baby…,” she said sadly.

Since she lost that child, Woolford-Saunders revealed, she got pregnant four times but suffered miscarriages before she was three months along.

“It is quite a worrying factor and the fact that my son wants a sibling. He is the only child at home and his other cousins have siblings and he always wants a companion…,” she said.

When she lost her child due to the shooting she comforted herself with the thought of having more children but now at 41 and after so many miscarriages she is not as anxious as before. The miscarriages were challenging mentally.

A blessing

Woolford-Saunders said having Jonathon has been a blessing to her and husband Joseph Saunders, even though she underscored the challenges.

“He is a lot of fun to be with and I wouldn’t want to ever lose him. He is very connected to his father but yes there are challenges raising him,” she said.

Jonathon is enrolled at the Diagnostic Centre at the Cyril Potter College of Education and which is headed by Keon Chung. He is at the centre three days a week where he is involved in physio, speech and occupational therapy. This has been a great support mechanism for the family as they would copy what is done at the centre at home.

Woolford-Saunders said the cerebral palsy has affected her son’s mobility and speech to an extent but over the years he has been improving as he has been exposed to the services of the Ptolemy Reid Rehabilitation Centre, the Georgetown Public Hospital and Project Dawn. The last of which has assisted in identifying some of the issues her son faced and what needed to be done to help to address these.

Over the years, Jonathon attended normal school, his only problem was not being able to write as quickly as the other children but when he wrote the Grade Six assessment he was awarded a spot at the Plaisance Secondary School and was honoured by Region Four for being the top student from the list of special needs children who wrote the examination in the region.

Recalling Jonathon’s birth, Woolford-Saunders said she had arrived at the hospital at around 9 pm and her son was not born until around 7 am the next day. The entire night she was in pain and is unclear today why she was not given a C-section, but when her oxygen deprived son was finally born he was blue, and the nurses and doctor were confused.

He was immediately placed in an incubator and the first-time mother said it was traumatic listening to the continuous cries of her son when there was nothing she could have done to help him. She was eventually discharged without her son which she said, “was a very sad transition” but at that time she thought it was, “better for me emotional wise to leave the hospital since I was there not sleeping and hearing my son cry all the time”. But she returned to the hospital shortly after and she remained there until her son was discharged.

During that time, Woolford-Saunders said, she had to build herself emotionally to cope with having her son and worrying about him dying. “So I had to build me first before I could have dealt with him and the whole situation.

“Recuperating during that period, I blamed the late doctor who attended to me at that time. My family had thought about taking legal action, but you know in Guyana the justice system is slow I was not prepared to go through that…,” she said.

He was known to be one of the best gynaecologists at the time in the country and Woolford-Saunders said while she blamed him she also blamed herself for not doing much research on the birthing process.

“At one time I had a blackout during the labour process. I collapsed on the bed. I don’t know what really happened and how long it was for but there was no doctor there at the time, just the midwife,” she recalled.

After she took Jonathon home, the mother said, she was forced to visit doctors’ office very often as a number of tests and other procedures were done as she attempted to find out what was wrong with him and also to ensure he was okay.

Five years after he was born, Woolford-Saunders and her husband were still navigating the system to get him needed help when what she described as a “relapse” occurred after she was hit by the stray bullet.

This incident took some of the wind out of their sails and it was sometime before they were able to be back on track with helping their son professionally.

Always wanted to teach

Her entering the teaching profession came as no surprise to Woolford-Saunders’ family. As a child, she always wanted to be a teacher and she has never one day regretted taking that career path.

She recalled that it was a well-known teacher in the village, Sir John Bernard, who dropped in her application and weeks later she was hired as a teacher at the St Paul Primary School. She remembered that she was told to turn out to work on October 1, but instead she and a friend, who has since switched careers, went to work on September 27.

“We were well dressed with stockings and shoes and our church clothes and the neighbours were like, ‘You all working already’,” she said, bursting into laughter.

She remained for four years at St Paul before going to LBI Primary School for another four years.

She spent 11 years at Plaisance Secondary which is where she believes she got her breakthrough as a teacher, as she acted immediately as a senior mistress a position she was later appointed to after she applied for same. She has been at St Winifred’s for the past two years but now she spends most of her time doing administrative work instead of actually teaching.

And being at schools whose students are at times written off by society, Woolford-Saunders said, she finds it a joy when the students excel and often she finds them more determined because of the challenges they face.

“And when you see them employed, regardless of what kind of job they are doing the main thing is that they are employed…,” she said adding that credit must be given to the teachers.

Over the years she has found joy teaching remedial classes as sometimes students are not ready for secondary and it is rewarding to bring them to a certain point.

“I usually would say we need everybody in life. We cannot do without the masons, carpenters and you find that those skilled people they would work for even more money than the office people…,” she said adding that the competency certificates now being introduced in school help to equip students with skills.

Over the years, the profession has been rewarding as she was a mentor at Plaisance, coordinator in the Region Four science fair, part of the Guyana Teachers’ Union and the vice-chair for the women’s arm.

Woolford-Saunders attended the Cyril Potter College of Education and since then, she said, she has never taken a break from studying. She laughingly said that she has never been a distinction student, but she has never been one to fail. She secured a certificate in education from the University of Guyana followed by a degree then the Education Management Certificate offered by the National Centre for Educational Resource Development and she also now holds a post-graduate certificate in education.