Compassionate and a fighter against injustice, Evelyn Estwick is a ‘Special Person’

Jul 23, 2011 News

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“I tell people that I’m not rich but I’m not at the bottom and I tell myself, from what I have, I could help or I could ask people to assist with these children in my village who really need.”

By Dale Andrews

People are special for so many different reasons. Our special person this week, for instance, is not a scholar – she does not have a Master’s Degree or a Doctorate. But what she lacks in the area of academia, she more than makes up for with a heart as large as the Atlantic and as soft as sponge.
It’s not that she is a pushover- far from that – for she is also known for her stand against injustice meted out to her fellow citizens, especially those in her home community of Buxton/Friendship on the East Coast of Demerara.

Today, she is one of the leading lights of the “cultural Buxton”, blazing the trail in Emancipation celebrations and other village activities that she values so much to dedicate most of her time.
Evelyn Edwards-Estwick, was born February 11, 1961, at Buxton Middle Walk, to Buxtonian Rudolph Edwards better known as ‘Papa’ and Enid Edwards, who hailed from Charlestown in the city.
As a child growing up in Buxton during the sixties and early seventies, Eve, as she is affectionately called, was no stranger to hard work and discipline, after all in those days, Buxton was at the forefront of producing Guyanese who had already left their mark on Guyanese society in a positive way.
During those early days of her life, although she did not have to struggle much, she learnt the value of hard work from her father, who was very much into farming, and who to this day is still in the vocation.
It should not be surprising that tilling the land was the Kindergarden lesson for the young Eve and her siblings.
“We grew up in farming because my father is a farmer, until now. He is still alive and still farming,” she boasted.
For Eve, even though she was a girl, like almost every child in the village there was no way she could escape tending to the pigs her father reared and the large kitchen garden the family cultivated, before and after school, for five days of the week.
Her early education was obtained at the Friendship Government School where she wrote the College of Preceptors (CP) examinations in the early 70s before leaving school.
In those days it was not always enough for a Buxtonian to just leave school with just a CP certificate, so Eve attended extra lessons with a view to writing the GCE O’Level examinations.
But then the government took over the private institution she was attending and for some reason, that put paid to any plans to continue. This was a bit strange for someone who later turned out to be as strong-willed as Eve.
“I grow up knowing people like Winifred Gaskin teaching me in school. Eusi Kwayana used to help me with English. We would sit down in County High School and he would teach us,” Eve reflected.
Learning did not stop there, however, for she took to the African groups that were prevalent in her community, and this nurtured her Afro-centric qualities in the precious teenaged years.
But by the early 1980s Eve, who had married Lindener Lennox Estwick  in December 1980, and was a mother of two,  begun to focus on the financial side of her life, and turned to trading in goods that were prohibited in that period.
She described her days of being married as challenging, since while she was the trader, her husband favoured the pen and paper, working at the Guyana National Cooperative Bank.
“Times were really rough… and only people with reasonable money could buy the flour to eat. We start going to Brazil, going to Trinidad and bring flour,” Eve recalled.
It was in those days that she had her first real encounters with the police.
“Sometimes the police chase our boat and we running away to hide and your things wet up and you hustling to see what you could do to hide yuh lil goods, yuh two bags with butter and suh to come and make a lil dollar,” she said with a smile on her face as if she was actually reliving the time.
Fortunately, she was never locked up, maybe because as she put it, “I coulda beg a lot.”
But then something happened that changed Eve’s perspective on life. She moved from Buxton to the neighbouring village of Friendship, where she had acquired a piece of land to build her house.
It was there she started to see herself as a person who had to help her fellow villagers.
“To me, Friendship is a poorer area. The poorer set of people come from Friendship, from the (railway) line go back. If you look in the area you will the poorest state of houses and the poorest state of children,” Eve stressed.
It was seeing the children with their tattered clothes and muddy appearance that touched something in her and she told herself that she must do something to help them.
And having children who mixed freely with others, her home was always full, and of course, there had to be food.
“I tell people that I’m not rich but I’m not at the bottom and I tell myself, from what I have, I could help or I could ask people to assist with these children in my village who really need.”
She explained that apart from using her own resources, she would go to friends and if she saw something that could be useful for the children in her community, she would not be afraid to ask for it.
Sometimes she would even feel the urge to cook two big pots of food and share to the needy in the Buxton/Friendship area.
“Sometimes I don’t have any particular money, but I would cook and go out by ‘Smiley’ shop, carry the pot on the road and call all the children from the back. You only got to hear Auntie Eve cook food and on the road, and the children would come running.”
Eve said that at one time that was an every-Sunday activity, since she was greatly assisted by a Muslim brother, who made it his duty to provide the finances and sometimes goods.
She said that she is encouraged to continue doing what she is doing because she is overwhelmed by the gratitude the beneficiaries show.
“The children does come to tell you thanks. When they pass you on the line, they would say ‘Auntie Eve’. The children never pass me straight and ain’t call out for Auntie Eve. They are poor, but they know what is proper.”
While many are of the view that the young people today are less respectful to their elders, Eve’s experience is quite the opposite, a claim that many would find strange, especially since she is referring to youths in the village of Buxton.
She is the adoptive parent of a young man, Kwesi, who she took into her home since he was five years old.
“In this area, if you stop on the line and ask where Auntie Eve live. They will listen to you and show you where. If I see them doing wrong, yes, I could call them and tell them, and they would listen to me or sometimes they see me coming and they would touch each other and say ‘look Auntie Eve coming’ ,” she said.
Eve believes that the respect comes from the way she reaches out to the youths in her community.
THOSE DARK DAYS
And this was evident during the crime wave that began in 2002 following the escape of five criminals from the Camp Street Prison.
Eve said that she does not like to recall those dark days, a period she desperately tries to put out of her mind.
It was the days when she saw the police come into her village and wake up the entire neighbourhood in the wee hours of the morning, looking for criminals.
“They used to tie up your sons like when you tying iguana to go and sell. My sons didn’t get tie up because I was a stern mother. I stand up to the police.”
Eve said that one day she stood in her verandah and saw the brutal treatment meted out to her neighbours who she swore were never involved in criminal activities.
The police had kicked down their door and there was a gunshot.
“Next thing yuh know, they bring one of the boys out, butt naked, with the soap on his skin, he was bathing to go to work and they brought him in the public. Is a soldier boy had to tell them, ‘no you can’t do that, carry that man in back let he bathe off and dress. And when I look over the other side, all my neighbours, like when you got iguana going to the market, they bring them out and this neighbourhood lef’ without young men,” Eve recalled.
She said that at one time the police had detained almost 180 young men from the community.
Eve was even accused of organizing a protest to free the young men, a charge she did not deny, making her a much watched figure in the community at that time.
“I stood up for my people because they’re my people, I born here and as a mother, you’re not supposed to stand up and see those things happen to your children,” Eve stated, adding that she was never fearful of being locked up by the police.
“At one time I went down to the back with the media and showed them how the police break up people house and so, and the same day, my son in the States was lying in this house and the police were all around taking pictures of it,” she added.
Try as she might, she could not meet with any of the powers that be to vent her frustration of what was taking place. She believes that maybe they saw her as being supportive of the criminal elements in the village.
But many would argue that the villagers had encouraged the criminals to seek refuge in their community and Eve found herself between a rock and a hard place.
She was adamant in pointing out that she was in no way connected to or supportive of any criminal activity that emanated from her community. As a matter of fact, she pointed out that many other communities have criminals and yet the people there are not ostracized like those in Buxton/Friendship.
She remembers the damage done to her village by the pronouncements of many influential persons following the Lusignan Massacre.
“They said that the farmers of Buxton are criminals, they going into the backdam and they were criminals, and I spoke out about it because they were wrong to the people of Buxton, especially the farmers,” Eve stated, adding that currently Buxton has returned to the days of producing an abundance of farm products.
“When I see the amount of stuff coming out of the backdam now, I feel good. You could see bags of ochro, boulanger and squash.”
She believes that many people used her community to perpetuate their separate agendas.
“I don’t feel that this place got all those bad people,” she said, noting that the police and the government had their work to do, but probably could have done it in a better manner.
“If you pressure the people, you’re only going to harden the people. You have to make friends with the people so that they can help you,” said the mother of two sons and a daughter.
The flood OF 2005
Eve’s compassion for her fellow villagers was aptly manifested during the flood of 2005.
For six weeks she toiled day and night preparing meals for those who were badly affected by the natural disaster.
“I had to come out in the morning in the flood with a boat. Sometimes you’re soaked and you try to change in a lil shack on the line top and then you have four or five pots bubbling, because everybody waiting.”
It was not as if Eve had to do it all by herself, she had the help of other brave women in the community, since another of her gifts is the ability to organize persons in group work.
Though it was tiring, Eve says that she got the strength from the Almighty and she did not see it as a burden.
“I didn’t believe that I could have done that six weeks… cooking in that rain and flood out there, but God gave me the strength. Not a day I ever stay in. I see it as helping my people.”
As a matter of fact whenever anything of that nature occurs in the village, most people would consult with Eve, “Auntie Eve wha we gone do?”
Normally, in the community of Buxton/Friendship, if there is a death, by unanimous decision, you could put your head on a block, the food for the wake would be prepared at Eve’s house, under her supervision, and this is done without any thought of being rewarded.
“Up to day before yesterday (last Wednesday), I cook the food for Jean Isles wake. All the big five-gallon pots cook in this yard. I don’t charge nobody to cook wake food, because when you have a dead, is like all ah we dead, because is here all ah we born, grow and live.”
Like many persons of her ilk, Eve’s cooking skills were honed at home, watching her mother and grandmother prepare large amounts of food on the fireside.
She has since grown up loving the fireside, so much so that she plans to make a big splash for this year’s Emancipation celebrations in the village.
With the assistance of the other womenfolk of her community, she is assuring that anyone who visits Buxton/Friendship this Emancipation will feel as if they were back in Africa – at least food-wise.
Apart from her cooking skills, Eve also finds time to be a part of the Toucan Club, the Citizens’ Security Programme, the Mangrove Committee and any other national activity that she is called upon to participate in.
“Sometimes it can be very pressing. Sometimes I have to leave the business and go because I like helping people and I like to know that I’m there and I can put in my support.”
What a special person.

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