By Shabna Rahman
At age 47, Virginia ‘Sharon’ Samuels has survived many struggles and the toughest was having to live alone with her younger brother and fending for him and herself at the tender age of seven, as well as being emotionally and physically abused by a narcissistic partner.
But she has not survived poverty! She lives with four of her 10 children in a dilapidated house at the Parika Sea Dam, East Bank Essequibo (EBE). The area cannot be regularized because of its proximity to the sea defence and as such, has no electricity, no access to potable water and no proper road.
She is willing to move out if she gets an opportunity. But for now, she is taking advantage of being in the area because she gets paid to “watchman” a boat when it docks right behind her home. That helps to supplement her income as a janitor at a school.
The hardships started when her mother would leave her and her brother alone and “go out and drink.” Eventually, “she leff we with a friend and she never returned. My father never had time with we… he never look after we…”
“But I never do that, I stay with my children so they can’t say their mother go away and leave them,” she asserted.
Their grandmother then took care of them until she got sick. She had taught them to never ask anyone for food even if they didn’t have any.
So whenever the neighbours asked what they had to eat, Virginia’s favourite response would be “chicken curry. But this time we din even cook nothing.”
Sometimes when they could no longer bear the hunger, she would go to the back of their neighbour’s storeroom and “push my hand through a little hole and I would take the over-ripe bananas for me and my brother to eat.”
She was just seven years old and her brother was five when her grandmother died and left them alone in the house. The neighbours would only look over to make sure they were fine.
It was now her responsibility to take care of her brother. She got money to buy food by working with a residents to “wipe house, wash yard…” and do other chores.
“I used to cook on the fireside and when I couldn’t take off the pot I used to leave the rice to dry down. Sometimes we used to ask people to take off the pot, sometimes we used to ask for money. When you ask man fun money, is a different thing, a different scenario. Suh come I end up wid me daughter at 16.”
She explained that one of men she asked for money, requested sexual favours in return and when she became pregnant, the man abandoned her.
By then her 14-year-old brother had gotten a job on the ferry and “he help me to buy baby clothes” and other items. A few years later, she found a partner and moved with him to the Essequibo Coast. She got one child from that relationship before he passed away.
She then returned to Parika and after sometime she ended up meeting someone else. That was the biggest mistake of her life because he turned out to be a narcissist and abused her mentally and physically. It started even before she and him had children together.
“He would beat me for no reason at all. I never had to do anything for him to beat me,” she said. He also deprived her of money and barely gave her a little to run the home. He used most of the money he worked for to support his alcoholic habit.
The beating would start when he returned home from his drinking spree. “He would just come home and start slapping me up and beating me with cutlass and suh,” she remembered.
Endured
She kept her cool and endured the abuse because he was the only one working. But she was not his only victim! He was also very cruel to the children and when he got angry he beat them up as well.
She recalled that at one time he mercilessly beat one of her daughters “with a piece of wood on her feet… Then he ducked she in the trench and almost drown she just because of $40 (she took) to buy a popsicle. My son used to run away at nights and sleep under a truck” because he was afraid of being in the house with him.
Finally she got a job as a janitor at a school and that was when she decided that she had enough. “The day I start working and earning I put up fight… At one time I even lash him with a piece of wood and (another time) I juk he with a knife,” she recalled.
After he fell to the ground she went to the police station to make a report. She told the officers that they should accompany her to see if he was dead. He was taken to the hospital for treatment.
After that he eased up fighting but the heavy drinking continued. Eventually during his drunken state, he burnt their house down. He served one year in jail for the crime.
Having nowhere to go, she and the children stayed for a short while at his sister’s house until they were no longer welcomed and she “put we out.” She stayed with her daughter for a little and then moved to another area nearby.
In 2012 that house collapsed. She got the house they are currently living in by bartering it with the owner for some zinc sheets.
Aside from the two jobs that she does, she would also plant a kitchen garden when the weather permits. The flooding from the inclement weather and from the spring tide would destroy her crop. In her yard were two pens where she rears white chickens for “home use. I would sell a little from it too.”
She prefers to rear her own chickens because “a small one would sell for $2000” and it would not be enough for me and me children.”
Despite trying so hard, there are times when her home would be without food. “When I don’t have food for them to take to school I would tell the teacher,” she said. She noted that her children are contented. “Sometimes if I cook rice and I don’t have anything to make stew, they would eat butter and rice or salt and rice or I go to the river and catch fish with hooks.”
She told this newspaper quite matter-of-factly, “Me don’t take worries you know. Once they’re contented with what we have, I good. Sometimes they would eat the school biscuit they bring home and would tell me not to cook. They would have it with sugar water.”
Virginia chooses not to stress over her situation, because “the problem is if you study that life is hard, sometimes yuh sugar raise, yuh pressure raise. Or you would get sick as soon as you go in the shop and see the prices… Everything is so expensive!”
It is for that reason that she did not celebrate Christmas last year. She would just cook something nice for them with the chicken that she rears. She did not decorate her home because she “prefers to use the money to buy ration to cook for them.”
He children’s father lives nearby and when the children went to him for money a few times “he would always say he don’t have so I told them not to go back.”
Virginia may still have her struggles, but she feels at peace and is happy, knowing that she survived the abuse and has the freedom to be herself and not to be manipulated.
