Soul of Rurality awardee Rosamund Benn is a living example of resolve and grit
Rosamund Benn nee Gouveia was just 16 years old when she got married and according to her did not know “how to cook or keep house or how to do farm work”, nor was she equipped with any skills to earn a living. However, she was a quick learner, and began to farm with her husband and to take their produce to market.
By virtue of hard work, taking every opportunity to learn about agricultural production and adding value to farm produce, Benn, now 58, is an agro-processor, trading under the name Pomeroon Rose Products, and inspiring other women by her example. She pioneered the marketing of virgin coconut oil in Region Two (Pomeroon/Supenaam).
“If you know to make green seasonings that is better than others you buy, don’t tell yourself you can’t market yours. Give it a try. I have encouraged lots of women, even some who work part time with me, to get on board. You have your own coconuts, make your own coconut oil and sell it. The money you get from that can give you a push. If you stop when challenged, that is when your plant will die. Continue watering it. It will grow and one day it will bear the fruits you were looking for,” Benn said.
For her years of toiling with her husband and for inspiring others, Benn, on Thursday last, received the ‘Soul of Rurality Award’ after being named a ‘Leader of Rurality of the Americas’ by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA) at the Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas in San Jose, Costa Rica.
Benn of Grant Wide Garden,
Lower Pomeroon River, was born in Waramuri Village, Moruca. “When I attended Waramuri Primary School, there were very few houses and lots of bushes on Waramuri Mission. We walked barefoot to school on the hot white sand there. The village was very poor and we were very poor,” she recalled.
She left Waramuri Primary at 15, after she wrote Parts I and II of the Secondary Schools Proficiency Examinations and obtained three Grade As and a B of which she was proud.
Benn, who is of Warrau and
Lokono (Arawak) ancestry, was about six months old when her father left her mother to fend for herself and their two children. She subsequently met and married Benn’s stepfather, with whom she had eight more children.
“After living for about eight years on the mission we moved to Para over the swamp to be closer to the farm lands where life improved a bit. The challenge was getting to school during the rainy season. Sometimes we had no boat to get across the swamp to school… In the dry season we walked on round woods to get across,” she explained.
In those days, employment was non-existent in Waramuri. Only the village nurse and teachers had steady jobs. Both men and women left their homes to work as farm hands and labourers on the farming grants on the Pomeroon where they earned meagre wages. Some of the men left the village to work in the timber grants and gold fields further away.
“Life was very difficult for us. Money was hard to come by except for when my stepfather went out to work. I recall women weeding between the cassava trees but being paid with a quake of cassava root weighing between 50 to 70 pounds, for a day’s work,” she said.
During the early 80s, she said,
“We couldn’t get many items. I remember my dad [stepfather] looking for a special tree for its roots. He’d scrape the roots and wash it in the water to create soap-like suds to wash our clothes. We fetched water for home use from ponds dug close to the home.”
Meeting Randolph
At school, Benn took part in athletics. Her husband-to-be, Randolph Benn of the Pomeroon River, five years her senior, had first seen her run in a race and began to pursue her but she resisted his advances. He wrote letters to her but she never responded.
“Whenever, I went to Charity with my parents to sell cassareep and coffee beans and he saw me he spoke with me. Overtime, I became attracted to him and I grew to love him,” she said.
When she left school in 1981, Benn accompanied her parents that August to work in the Pomeroon. One day Randolph, then 21 years old, stopped at their place of work to sell fish and he saw her again. “Two weeks later, he asked my parents to marry me. My mom said I was too young and I didn’t know to cook or how to keep a house,” she recalled.
Her future mother-in-law said she would teach her the things she needed to know and her mother told Randolph to wait until she was 16. Benn celebrated
her 16th birthday on the 8th December, and was married on the 31st December. Now married for 42 years, they have four daughters, a son and 12 grandchildren.
Randolph’s parents were farmers and fisherfolk and he too fished and farmed. They lived with Randolph’s parents for six years during which time they started building their home.
Farming
When they married, Benn’s mother-in-law gave Randolph five acres of transported land. The newly-weds also acquired some 40 acres of leased lands from the government.
In the 1980s when they got their first parcel of land, they planted all types of vegetables as well as bananas, plantains, sweet potatoes, eddoes and coconuts, their main crop.
“When contraband was the going thing and people made their money from contraband, we made money from farming. That’s how we built our house,” she said..
Her mother-in-law taught her how to bake cassava bread and they baked to supply the Georgetown market.
“I baked about 150 cakes a day starting very early in the morning and finishing about 2 pm,” she recalled.