‘Everybody wants to go to Guyana’
From 4A
Persaud’s first job in Jamaica after graduation was at a legal aid clinic. “People called on the phone. One day, even the secretary could not understand what the man was saying. She passed the phone to me. The man said, ‘I have been trying to explain to that woman that I need a lawyer to go to court and get this hocus pocus document. The court is going to release my son.’ I understood he needed a habeas corpus writ. In Guyana, the ordinary man wouldn’t tell you he wants to apply for a habeas corpus writ. He would just tell you he wants his son to get out of jail,” she surmised.
Settling in Jamaica
In 1993, she took up the offer of a scholarship from the British Council to pursue a postgraduate course, the Commonwealth Young Lawyers Diploma in London, England.
“In England I had my brush with racism and I was totally appalled. Some White people saw me on the road and called me ‘Black Bitch’ and that kind of thing. We always say Guyana is a racist place but I grew up in Georgetown and I never knew what racism was,” she said.
Persaud’s husband joined her in the UK but her daughter remained in Guyana. In 1994, her husband returned to Jamaica from the UK to start training in orthopaedics; his younger brothers were also studying at UWI.
“I went back to Guyana to pack up and sort out my office to return to Jamaica,” she said.
Back in Jamaica, she worked with the largest credit union in the country until 2009 after which she ventured into private practice with a law firm to do corporate work. She joined Norman Manley Law School as a tutor in 2012 and then got into an accident and broke the hip she had broken as a child. “I had a series of surgeries thereafter to enable me to get better,” she added.
As a trained mediator, she does mediation matters in the parish courts and arbitration for credit unions. “It is a process that the credit union laws allow before you venture into the courts,” she noted.
Of Jamaicans, she said, “They are one of the most welcoming people, especially to Guyanese. Trinidadians and Barbadians treated some of us rather badly, especially hucksters who were hustling to make a living. They treated Jamaicans very badly too. Jamaica has been good to me and my family,” Persaud said.
Background
Persaud’s parents were from Bath Settlement. They had ten children; seven boys and three girls.
When Persaud was about five years old, her father, Ernest, now 95, moved his entire family from Bath Settlement to live in Georgetown so they could have better educational and job opportunities.
“He saved up money to pay rent for six months in Georgetown. He did that mainly because he was already paying boarding and lodging for two of my brothers who were attending high schools in Georgetown,” she recalled.
Persaud attended St Winefride’s Roman Catholic School, North Georgetown Secondary and sixth form at St Rose’s High School.
“In 1973 I injured my left hip, on account of running wild when I was 11 years old. I was hospitalised initially
at Woodlands and then at the Georgetown Hospital, where I stayed for almost a year,” she recalled. “The accident occurred just before I was due to start high school. In 1974, I entered first form at North Georgetown on a pair of crutches.”
While at St Rose’s, she did a work study stint at Cameron and Shepherd, where she met her lifetime mentor, attorney Josephine Whitehead.
“As a young East Indian Hindu girl, a lot of the options were not to pursue a higher education,” she noted. “I saw my cousins being matched up with some suitable young men. I didn’t want to marry at a young age and my parents didn’t want that either for their daughters. I wanted to be financially independent.”
In 1981 Persaud was one of 25 students admitted to the Faculty of Law at UG, where she did economics and sociology as a precursor to the bachelor of law degree at UWI Cave Hill. In 1982, all the students were successful. However, Guyana, as a contributing country, had owed UWI a lot of money. That year the Guyana Government decided that all students going to UWI had to pay their own tuition.
“Only a handful of law students were able to go,” she recalled. “I was able to go because my mother and next door neighbour, a Jamaican woman working at Caricom and who became an adopted mother to me said, ‘You gotta go whether we have to beg or borrow that money.’”
That was when Persaud’s mother decided to move to
the US, where she had family members. “She worked and sent money to me. That is how I went to Cave Hill for two years and subsequently to UWI Mona,” she said. “A lot of students could not come up with the money that year. A few went and could not continue. Tuition was about US$10,000 and the cost of living in Barbados was expensive.”
Previously, the law students had done a three-month stint in the Guyana National Service on the basis that the government would pay their tuition at Cave Hill. Her stint was at the New Opportunity Corps at Onderneeming, Essequibo Coast.
“I cried all the way on the ferry from Parika to Supenaam,” she said. “I had never left home before apart from going to UG. On the way my father said to me, ‘Girl dry you tears. Anything you want, you nose have to drip.’”
She has no regrets about her stay at Onderneeming. Dr Gladstone Mitchell, who was in charge of Suddie Hospital and whose daughters were her friends, visited her regularly to ensure she was well.
“He lived on Crown Street and we lived in Laluni Street in Queenstown. Interestingly, it was his daughter, Vivienne, who introduced me to my husband the day I came to Jamaica,” she said. “She dragged him from the lunchroom to meet me. He was not happy but she insisted and he complied.”