Oluatoyin Alleyne

“I would close up like around 10 sometimes, you know, because people coming from work does stop and buy.

Alicea Dias’s life was snuffed out over 20 years ago when an allegedly drunken driver knocked her off of her motorbike, but the years have not lessened her mother’s pain even though the tragedy gave her a voice she never thought she had.

“It was too overbearing and sometimes you feel like a slave in you own country and one day I just couldn’t take it anymore and me and another girl we just have to stand up fuh we rights.

Carjacked in a foreign country, an experience that saw a gun placed at the head of her three-year-old daughter; raped by a colleague and having her father falsely accused and prevented from leaving Guyana for nine years are just some of the terrible experiences Cheryl Noel has had in her life, but instead of becoming bitter she is on a mission to help the younger generation.

“Being a single parent has it positives and  its negatives. For me I have learnt to look past the fact that I am a single parent because honestly sometimes I don’t even remember that these children have a father.”

In 2015, Rodell Hinds had a visual inspection of cervix with acetic acid (VIA) done and cancerous cells were detected and presumably treated through cryotherapy, with follow-up treatment done the following year.

It was out of the need to connect with Guyanese who were interested in seeing films by Guyanese and Caribbean filmmakers that the Timehri Film Festival was born three years ago, according to Romola Lucas, one of its founders.

 By Oluatoyin Alleyne and Bebi Oosman Cervical cancer patient Arlene Tyndall, who succumbed just over a week ago, was diagnosed with late stage cervical cancer last August but because of her low blood count, treatment was not immediately administered.

Just days after what many would have considered the happiest day of her life, Donessa Barker was burnt with hot water.

“I never give up on my children. I always fight fuh them and even if I have to catch crab to help mind dem I do it,” the words of 47-year-old Cheryl Benn, a mother of 14.

Faced with an exorbitant price to have her settee set reupholstered and not being guaranteed its completion for the Christmas season, 52-year-old Wendy Chichester-Norville took matters into her own hands; armed with a staple gun, tacks, needle and thread, scissors and a hammer she did the job herself.

“Tell me we get paid since the 22nd of December last year and to date we can’t get no money.

Medic Lorlene Ramsundar is on a mission to ensure that every woman she meets knows the importance of having a Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) or a pap test done, both of these reveal whether cancerous cells are present on the woman’s cervix.

She sat across from me, shaking. It was hard to decide whether it was because she was cold from the air-conditioner in the room, or fearful.

Journalism may have always been in Sherry Ann Dixon’s bones, but it would be safe to say that she discovered this purely by mistake.

I had a pap test. This is a test that is done to ascertain whether a woman has cervical cancer.

Several peeled bulbs of garlic lay on the counter before him and as he was in the process of peeling more, he briefly took his eyes away from the task to address this reporter.

Having felt, witnessed, and heard of violence against women in all forms, Akima McPherson decided to address the issue that destroys women every day, whether by death, emotionally, psychologically or even spiritually.

“You know I don’t really get to enjoy me fairy lights and Christmas decorations because now is time to tek down and is like only the other day I put them up,” Marian said with some amount of genuine disappointment.

Thirty-nine-year-old Kim (not her real name) has been literally living from day to day for the past 15 years and as she enters the New Year she does not see her situation changing because she believes being HIV positive is a case of having “one foot in the grave.”