The sad and tragic tale of faceless children

May 31, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,

Please allow me space in your newspaper to once again bring to you and your readership’s attention the escalating plight of children without faces. –Jason (not his real name) age 15 has been missing since Sunday 21st May, 2017. Life in the city is not easy but then again, life back in the village is any easier. As the public is becoming more educated about child abuse, human trafficking and protective intervention many people all across Guyana and the Caribbean are perhaps reflecting on their own childhood days realising that they too were abused.
The abuse whether it was physical, sexual, or emotional would have appeared normal to them as children. Nobody talked about it; abuse was not part of our vocabulary back then. Some children even looked forward to the abuse and internalised it as affection from their abuser. I recalled my early years practicing as a psychotherapist here in Guyana, when I received an overseas call; the caller said that she was in her early forties and had recently migrated to North America. She said had she not travelled abroad her awareness would have went unnoticed.
The caller said it had never occurred to her that something was wrong with her 64 years old mother until she had migrated, and can’t help the feelings that she (caller) and her father were living in hell and didn’t know it. The caller cried out, poor daddy! All those years he was so loyal to mommy. She said the feelings were so strong that something was not right with her mother that she started looking for a therapist in Guyana. She related that she didn’t have to look too far as there was only one listing in the local telephone directory. The caller made an appointment for her mother to come in.
Hilda (not her real name) arrived on time for her appointment; she was decked out in her Sunday best. Hilda insisted that nothing was wrong with her, claiming that her daughter was just worried about nothing but since her daughter insisted, she kept her appointment. The first visit went well. Hilda completed paperwork and felt comfortable sharing lite conversation.
It was on Hilda’s third visit that she began opening up. About ten years earlier at the age of 54, while watching the Opera Winfrey show on childhood sexual abuse—it was then and there that she (Hilda) made the discovery that what had happened to her was a violation and a crime. In the past ten years her life had gotten worst, feelings of guilt consumed her, and she blamed herself for the abuse but felt trapped because of the deep convicted love that she still carried around for her dead abuser. Hilda said that life has not been easy, and described a feeling of being heavier and heavier with each passing year since watching that Opera Winfrey show.
Hilda shared her experience of being sexually abused from the age of nine until her sixteenth birthday. The abuser was a close family member a big man who she fell in love with. “In the earlier years it was painful when he penetrated me but he was gentle and caring”. Hilda vividly described her abuser as tall, dark, and handsome and he smelled so good to this day she could still recognise the smell of Brut Cologne whenever a gentleman would pass by her wearing it.
Hilda said she would go to the window just to see him hoping and skipping down the long dirt walkway dressed in his all white suit, with matching white shoes and hat while whistling. “I would get so excited because he would always have a bag of hot peanuts in his pocket just for me along with his small jar of Vaseline”. “I would look forward to those Saturday and Sunday mornings treats of hot peanuts and breakfast”. She continued, “To this day I love peanuts—that’s the only memory I have of him now”. And when he was done with her, Hilda said he would lift her up and take her into the kitchen and sit her down on a chair or sometime on the table and she would watch him make her the biggest breakfast while he was singing away.
I recalled the day when Hilda stood up tall with her back erected and chest up in the air and shook herself off from side to side. Then with a proud smile on her face she said now there I feel light, 50 years of dead weight gone! I sat there in my chair and literary watched a nine year old child go through Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. In a few short months, Hilda blossomed into a woman by meeting all her milestones, shading off decades of co-dependency, trapped in a cage that robbed her of her innocence free at last! Hilda now had language to verbalise her inner most thoughts and feelings.
Hilda said she got married young to the first young man that noticed her and came calling, just to escape the big secret. She described how she compared her ex-husband who truly loved her to that of her childhood abuser; had she known what she knows now—that she was abused as a child, her life would have been different and probably still be married. Hilda reported that her marriage ended because she was detached from her emotions, and did not enjoy sex, she just existed void of any expressions or responsiveness for those close to her including her only child. She explained that her ex-husband did everything in the home including raising their only child. While she just quietly watched on with a smile and after their divorce he continued to care for her—running all her errands and taking her to church on Sundays and to her doctor appointments.
But Jason is missing. By the end of three months Hilda was going to the market on her own, calling a taxi for herself, deciding what meals she’ll prepare for the week, attended a prayer group meeting for the first time, and started tending to the plants in the yard again, for the first time on a weekly basis. She also reported that she started going to the beauty salon for the first time instead of her ex-husband buying that boxed hair dye.
The housekeeper went from three days a week to one day a week for doing laundry only. Hilda announced that she will be paying for her therapy sessions from here on with her allowance, had applied for a passport and planned to join her daughter who arranged a babysitting job in her newly soon to be adopted land. A few months later, Hilda called to say thank you as she was preparing to leave these shores. As a seasoned practitioner, I was in a state of SHOCK! This was a scenario buried in one of those text books on my bookshelf and besides that this kind of stuff happens in the first world where treatment is readily available but not here in my beloved Guyana!
Hilda represents tens of thousands of women and some men in Guyana and the Caribbean who were not fortunate to bring closure to their inner-childhood pain and are still living in a deep state of denial about its sordid past but at the same time, not yet ready to confront its promising future. Had I not lived and studied abroad I too would have missed the psycho-sociocultural implications of the lifelong negative effect of sexual abuse as it relates to clinical practice here in Guyana.
I started doing the math, this was in 2012 so this stuff was happening back in the 1950’s and 60’s, my immediate thoughts were many of these folks are still alive walking around with this level of intensified pain, and how many more who cannot afford treatment like Hilda? Now, I can truly discern why the cage bird sings.
Ingrid Goodman, BSc., MSW, ABA, CSME
Executive Director
PATOIS/WOMEN’S REFUGE
Community Mental Health Practitioner

 

Editor’s note: This letter was unfortunately caught up in a wrong heading on another page in our edition yesterday. We reprint it in full.

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