Retired agricultural scientist Guyanese Dr Reginald Thompson has moved from research and the formal classroom to mentoring and guiding students to become the best version of themselves on weekends in the Durham Education Mentoring Programme (DEMP) in Ontario, Canada.
“We’ve thought of replicating this programme in Guyana. The issue is that we have to get people to see it as participating as a way of giving back and not looking for payment. You have to give up some free time to volunteer. In our mentoring programme, we occasionally give an honorarium to some people who work for us but it is not something we do continuously because we have to get money to cover all those things. We are not always able to ‘pay’ volunteers,” Thompson told Stabroek Weekend in a recent interview from his home in Oshawa, Ontario, Canada.
