DESPITE facing, as a young person, circumstances that caused her to place her life’s ambition on hold for a number of years, Maureen Rampertab had always known that her magnum opus was to become a Guyanese author. And although she engaged in other occupations to make ends meet, her heart was set in the direction of her life’s great calling.

Eventually, with dogged persistence and hard work — not forgetting faithful encouragement from her children — Maureen was able to start living her dream.
Raised in the agricultural community of Canefield, East Canje Berbice, Maureen attended the Cumberland Methodist Primary and the Berbice High School. Early in life, she recognised her great passion for history, the arts and literature, and thus reading was one of her “great loves”, as she puts it. She would read just about anything she could lay hands on. “I read everything. I felt like I wanted to know everything the world had through reading,” Maureen told the Chronicle in an interview a few days ago.
She thought that becoming a journalist would be something of a stepping stone to achieving what her heart really longed for her to achieve, and in this vein, she decided to move to Georgetown in pursuit of her dream;    but family members weren’t very enthused by her career choice, and hence offered her precious little support.
Moreover, she found it hard to get the break she was looking for in the city. “It wasn’t easy at that time getting an opportunity to break into the newspaper. There wasn’t much going on, plus I had no connections; I knew nobody,” she disclosed.
Her family members felt she was wasting time, and it wasn’t long before she herself decided it was best for her to return home in Berbice.
When she got there, she started a diploma course in book-keeping and accounts, after which she began working.

Quit job to assist home
The vicissitudes of life caused Maureen to quit her job in order to care for her mother, niece and nephew. “I sacrificed ten years of my life, putting ambition, my studies, everything on hold,” she said. But she never gave up on her dream of becoming a writer. “Throughout the years, I continued to write in my spare time, and I compiled notebooks upon notebooks. I just kept packing them away because there was no opportunity,” she disclosed.

As a young girl, Maureen said she modelled her life on great women leaders like Baroness Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Benazir Bhutto.
She had a strong mind, steely determination, and a deep sense of value for womanhood. She also  became her father’s mouthpiece in political debates, sports and religion, and was also an ardent West Indian cricket fan.

Opportunity
According to her, the support and time she had waited for came from her two young children, Cherie and Shane, who recognised the value of her work and urged her to restart her writing. “Surprisingly, it was my children who gave me the support I needed. I stayed committed to them. I moulded them, guided them, and helped them along with everything step by step. And they saw in me what I had.”
In 2008, she was at a religious function when she was introduced to someone who made it possible for her to write short stories in a local newspaper. To date, approximately 100 of her stories have been published. She has even decided to expand, and has started offering her work to different media outlets.
And last year, two of  her books were published! To have one published has always been a dream for her. “So last year was a big year for me,” she laughed.
Her first book, ‘Butterflies in Paradise’, a collection of  short stories on the people who crossed the ‘Kala Pani’ (black water), was published last year  to commemorate Indian Immigration Day; and  ‘Story Time’, a collection of stories for children, was also published last year, in September, to coincide with Education Month.
Maureen is now endeavouring to have published next month her third book, ‘Footprints from India’, in recognition of Indian Arrival Day. Her ambition is to have published internationally her first novel, ‘A Caribbean Love Story’.
Maureen’s is a vivid imagination that crosses boundaries from real life to myths, legends, fairy tales, and to the beyond; and that imagination has come to life. Her story ideas and inspiration comes from scenes of everyday life, happiness, sadness, historical sites, nature, and from her imagination, fictionalised to create stories.
Her children continue to support her; and her daughter, now a second-year chemistry student at the University of Guyana, is the architect of the design and formation of the books’ covers and pages. Her son, a Queen’s College student, helps her with story ideas.
“I feel happy that I can reach out to people through my work. And I feel so proud that my books are in the book stores. So proud to know I am now a Guyanese author!
“I didn’t give up on my dreams. I followed my heart, my passion, my ambition. And I went with it despite all the stumbles and the different paths I was taken through. But the big thing for me is being recognised as a writer,” Maureen said.