Debbie Joseph-Hopkinson, 53, interim director of the Institute for Human Resilience, Strategic Security and the Future, University of Guyana and president of the Guyana Association of Professional Social Workers (GAPSW) has slowly but surely climbed the academic and professional ladders by following due process.
Having spent a greater part of her adult life at Love and Faith World Outreach Ministry with Apostle Claude Brooks and his wife Carol Brooks, she said in a recent interview with Stabroek Weekend, “One day, Apostle Brooks drew a step in the ground and said, ‘Debbie you cannot go from the bottom step straight to the top. You have to climb the steps one at a time.’ That stuck in my mind and I acted on it.”
She has pursued several certificate and professional courses including two diplomas and a bachelor’s degree at the University of Guyana (UG), a master’s degree at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and has her eyes on a doctorate in philosophy.
From St Gabriel’s Primary, she went to Richard Ishmael Secondary, Government Technical Institute (GTI) (1989), a supervisory training certificate course at Critchlow Labour College (1991), Introduction to Social Work I and II at the Institute of Distance and Continuing Education (2004), UG before pursuing a diploma and a bachelor’s degree in social work and a diploma in education (social studies) at UG, and a master’s degree in social work at UWI.
Joseph-Hopkinson is now seconded to the recently-established Institute for Human Resilience, Strategic and Security in the Future, UG as the interim director. Under her leadership, for the first time in its 60-year history, 17 students obtained master of science degrees in strategic development studies.
“From the master of science in strategic development studies we’re now offering three other programmes including information gathering and intelligence analysis. Very soon we’re going to launch a master of science in national security studies. We also have courses in trauma and grief resilience, resilience in gender-based violence, migration and human resilience, migration and law, and cognitive behavioural theory,” Joseph-Hopkinson said.
A social worker by profession, in 2020 when Covid-19 was wreaking havoc and taking lives, Joseph-Hopkinson along with co-worker Leon Kendall, managed the UG Cares Initiative.
“We ensured the hotlines were kept alive and we kept in touch with the elderly population and the shut-ins who formed part of UG pensioners programme and we did a lot of interventions with families. We were part of the planning for webinars and online meetings using Zoom to inform people about the pandemic, provide self-care tips, communicate with them so they remain grateful for life and not go into a state of depression,” she added.
GAPSW
Joseph-Hopkinson joined GAPSW in 2006 and was elected president in 2021.
“Soon we will be officially registering social workers because the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security is moving towards licensing them. To this end the association has begun to build a database. For licensure social workers will have to register with the GAPSW and have the association refer or recommend them,” she said.
Apart from licensure, the GAPSW works on a number of social issues. Joseph-Hopkinson said, “We collaborated with the Dorcas Group on the Mahdia Secondary School’s girls’ dorm fire. We also do a lot of work with vulnerable families and communities.”
When she joined GAPSW, she said, “Just about seven or nine persons showed up to meetings. It was functioning but it was not visible enough. We now get about 30 or more people attending and the meetings are more participatory. We want to keep that momentum going. We are about to launch a public relations programme to make people aware of what we are about.”
She added, “Everything depends on leadership. Under my leadership I’m hoping we can train the younger ones to begin to take over. I believe we must lead in such a way that those we lead must transition into position to excel and to lead even better than those who led them previously.”
She noted that the social work programme at UG is one of the more popular ones.
The GAPSW office has since moved from Woolford Avenue to Lot 10 D’Urban Street obliquely opposite the Assemblies of God Church.
Background
Joseph-Hopkinson grew up in Georgetown. Her parents were divorced and her mother remarried, she said, and, “I respected my stepfather who I called dad.”
Growing up, she said, “Some days were difficult and we ate salt and butter with rice, and rice with eschallot and pepper but we never went to bed hungry. I looked up to my mother who worked with the Sisters of Mercy. She walked from Forshaw Street, Queenstown to Meadowbrook, from Queenstown to Kitty and from Queenstown to Kingston where the Sisters of Mercy had their convents because she couldn’t afford to take a bus. When she returned home she fed us and made sure our uniforms for school the next day were cleaned and ironed. That stuck in my mind that I believe even in the minutest of tasks, I must do it with an attitude of excellence.”
At times when the family was without money, she said, “Mommy would send us to my biological father who worked somewhere on the East Bank Demerara to get money. I walked from Queenstown to his workplace only to hear he wasn’t paid. Those experiences helped to shape the intrinsic resilience in me and gave me a desire to be productive and to prosper.”
After successfully writing the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate exams at 16, Joseph-Hopkinson taught at a primary school for three months. Then for the next two to three years she worked at a travel agency. Her eldest brother, Roy Joseph, who was doing well in his job, encouraged her to upgrade her skills.
At 19 years old, she enrolled at GTI and obtained a diploma in commerce, after which, she secured a job at the now defunct Guyana Airways Corporation (GAC) on Main Street.
“Three months into working there, I was pregnant. A lot of people made fun of me – this lil Christian girl becoming pregnant. Nevertheless, I worked at GAC for ten years during which time I strayed a bit from God. I was earning my own money. Because I never had certain things I bought shoes and clothes and started to dress up,” she recalled.
When GAC folded in 1999, she found work as a supervisor for the night shift doing data entry at EISYS.
Shortly after she left EISYS, she accompanied a friend and her baby to a paediatrician. While at the clinic she helped the receptionist to put together the files on that busy day. The paediatrician saw her and offered her the work of the receptionist/clerk who was leaving that weekend.
“I worked there for a year. While there, [one day] three young girls, 11, nine and seven years old … all tested HIV positive. Their stepfather had interfered with them,” she recalled.
That night she dreamt about doing social work. She got up and started to look up what social work was. She found that the University of Guyana was offering programmes in social work and first enrolled in UG’s Institute of Distance and Continuing Education certificate programmes before doing the diploma and bachelor’s degree.
“I started my studies very late because I had to work. I got my son at 19 years old. His father, the head of one of our military organisations, abandoned us,” she recalled.
Without her mother and her entire family circle she could not have made it on her own. “My mom stopped working to look after my son. Because of her I was able to work, study and do a lot of things I would not have been able to do.” Now married for the past 18 years, Joseph-Hopkinson said her marriage is a good one, which has produced a daughter who is now 15 years old.
Joseph-Hopkinson began volunteering with the Volunteer Youth Corps Inc in 2004. Her volunteer work has enabled her to travel overseas and make presentations on youth development.
“I volunteer with the Salvation Army and with youth groups at church. I’m volunteering with the Child Evangelical Fellowship. I volunteer in whatever capacity I could. I volunteer sometimes to train people, youth groups, leaders at the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security. It depends on what I’m called to do. I do a lot of volunteering through teaching, particularly on mental health and parenting issues,” she said.
Studying
Joseph-Hopkinson was 34 years old, unemployed, and had no money to pay tuition fees when she was admitted to start the diploma programme in social work at UG in 2004. Her brother-in-law, the late Ellington Maison stood as guarantor for her student loan. “I thank him for giving me that start,” she said.
In 2005 she was married. “My husband wasn’t a man of wealth. We didn’t always have the money so I walked from Queenstown to UG… I completed my degree in 2009. I should have completed it in 2008 but then I was pregnant and was on complete bed rest,” she said
Though Joseph-Hopkinson completed the degree in social work with distinction, she could not afford to attend the graduation ceremony so she did not walk the stage to symbolically receive her certificate, nor had she done so when she finished the diploma programme.
After graduating, she taught for a number of years at the Institute for Business Education (IBE) at Lusignan. While teaching she saw an advertisement for lecturers in the Department of Sociology at UG, applied, was interviewed and was successful.
She started in 2010 as an assistant lecturer in the Social Work Unit.
Now lecturing at UG for 13 years, she is grateful to “not only impact students in their academic studies but in life’s values and principles. When students graduate and thank me for being a part of their journey, I know I am doing something worth living for. When my daughter says ‘Mom you are my role model’, I’m happy because she can look within her own home circle for a role model.”
TT experience
In 2014, Joseph-Hopkinson applied for a scholarship that was offered through UG for the master of science degree at UWI, St Augustine Campus, Trinidad and Tobago (TT). She was given professional development leave without pay.
“UG said they had no one to take up the classes I taught and they would have to pay someone else. That did not stop me. I decided if God opened a scholarship for me I would go because that was the pathway towards promoting me in ways beyond what I was then and even now. I took the risk knowing I had God on my side,” she said.
After the first semester her husband and daughter joined her in TT.
“We rented a house and I moved from the dorms. The cheapest available around St Augustine at the time was TT$4,000. That was my stipend. I took my daughter to enrol her in public school and they weren’t accepting students from Guyana. We had to enrol her in a private school. Before my husband found a job, there were days in Trinidad when we didn’t have $20 and we didn’t know where our next meal was coming from,” she recalled.
She had made friends with a classmate, Donna Marceline Samuel, in a work-study group. Samuel welcomed her into her family. “Our house was semi-furnished. They came and moved me out and helped to furnish the apartment. She dropped me home and she picked me up,” she said.
In her final year, Joseph-Hopkinson received a call from her bank in Guyana informing her that her house was up for repossession because she was not up to date on the mortgage. She prayed. A few days later, she received a phone call from UG informing her that they were going to resume paying her salary from that month.
“That was how God moved. I was able to pay my instalments and salvage my home. I’m grateful to UG and the young woman who represented my case for recognizing I needed to be paid. Others who were on scholarships were paid their salaries on professional development leave. I was paid for the last eight months of my study,” she said.
One of her brothers Dr Osafo Joseph and colleagues from an inner circle called Family and Friends (FAF) also supported her. She should have finished the masters programme in 2016 but she fell ill. She graduated in 2017.
“When I landed in T&T for graduation, one of my friends from FAF, Adelaide, who had come to see Donna and I graduate, brought me a beautiful dress. I walked the stage in it in 2017. I laugh because when I see the goodness of God and I have to tell people, I am, because Christ is,” she said.
Having returned to work, she was promoted to lecturer 1. She later served as the coordinator of the master’s degree for social work programme for two years.
Recently she was an integral part of the master in social work review process. “I hope the unit will use the number of recommendations coming out of it in going forward to improve the programme,” she stated.
