By Akola Thompson

EVERY morning, 51-year-old Paula F. (not her real name) wakes up, completes her morning rituals, and then joins a food line at the Georgetown Night Shelter in North-East La Penitence, Georgetown.After breakfast, she leaves the compound and tries to find a job. There never seems to be any vacancies, even if there is a vacancy sign.
“It’s as if they know,” she whispers.

During the interview, she stared at me from six feet away, coming over and sitting only upon my request. She has been a resident at the shelter for close to nine years, during which she has done courses on HIV and domestic abuse, and has completed a floral arrangement course at Carnegie.
For the first few minutes, Paula seemed reluctant to speak. An unspoken fear plastered on her face, she seemed to think that I might shun her. Upon hearing her story, I began to understand her fear. I could not blame her; people have disappointed her time and time again.

As a child, Paula learnt the importance of working hard, thanks to her mother, whom she described as an “incredibly strong woman”. While other children were learning how to make ‘pretend-food,’ Paula was learning how to work for her own money alongside her mother, who was a household maid. She continued working alongside her mother up until 1999, when her mother died of brain cancer.

“She was strong, but cancer, that stronger than everybody.”

Paula described her life after her mother’s death as a “haze”. Never knowing who her father was, she had to depend upon her elder sister, who had inherited the family home. Adolescence came and went, and Paula would eventually become a mother of seven, having had her first child at 18.

‘BIG’ DREAM
She joked that it had always been her dream to have 12 children, but that dream was cut short. “I like big families,” she said. I asked her how she could have possibly provided for 12 children with the current economy. She smiled and said, “God always provides”.

Her seven children were born out of relationships with three different men, with whom she lived for a while before personal circumstances caused the relationships to end. Of Paula’s seven children, five are still alive. As she recounts the deaths of the two, her face takes on an almost stoic expression, as if she were steeling herself against her own words. Her first child, she said, “Supposedly die of gastro-enteritis” while she was in the Pomeroon. I asked her why she used the word “supposedly,” and she smiled and said, “Because I don’t think my baby died. His father take him to Berbice to live, and suddenly I hear my child dead; and soon after, the father disappear.”

Questioned as to whether she believed the same happened to her second deceased child, she violently shook her head and stated that her baby, one of a pair of twin girls, had died in her arms.

“You know how hard that is for a mother? For one of they twin baby to die in they arm?” The child, she said, was mere months when she died. She had fallen down one day and was immediately taken to the hospital, but a week later, the child was dead.

Two of her daughters are living with their husbands, another one lives in Sophia with her cousin, and the other three are still living with her sister in West Ruimveldt. Her eldest child is 31, while the youngest is 16.

After her last failed relationship, which domestic abuse ended, Paula moved back in with her sister, but, shortly thereafter, was asked to leave. To this day, she stated, the reason is still unclear.

With nowhere to go, she sought residence at a local motel, where she paid $700 a night until she found a long-term place to stay, which caused her $10,000 a month.

“It was smaller than this here,” she said, making wide gestures with her arms. “There was only space enough for a bed, bathroom and toilet, and that was it. Clothes everything had to be pushed under the bed, but I made it my home because I had nowhere else to go, and could not afford anywhere else.”

At the time Paula was working at Roshan Khan’s Security Service. There, she met a man with whom she began talking. Eventually, she said, mutual attraction developed.

UNPROTECTED SEX
The first night they had sex, she said, he took her to his apartment and shut off the lights before he removed any of his clothing. She said she did not find it odd, until the next morning, when she woke early to use the washroom and saw marks “like itches” all over his torso. After that, “He didn’t stick around for much longer; he knew what he did to me.”

Despite the nagging feeling that something was wrong, she did not suspect him to be infected with HIV/AIDS. It was not until the year 2006, two years after, when she repeatedly became sick for long periods, that she took a test after being advised to do so. At this time, she was living with a man with whom she had formed a close relationship. “We were happy,” she said, “until he found out my status.”

Paula said that when she found out she was HIV positive, everything changed; all the doors that might have still been opened were now closed. Asked whether she did not know the risks of having unprotected sex, she became defensive, and I had to assure her that it was not a judgment but merely a question to gain more information.

Despite being an open secret, sex, she said, was never discussed within the family. “You does see these modern day children and they parents sitting down to talk bout birds n’ bees; I never had that. I know bout sex since I small, because everybody talking bout it — this goes there and wherever. You even know all the false name they call it, especially in a neighbourhood like we own. No one gave us advice on the bad things bout sex, you’d hear hints of it, but you never really know, yuh know.”

Getting her back to our line of questioning, I expressed my curiosity about the man she was living with, and whether he had ever gotten tested.

KICKED OUT
“I had to tell him of my status,” she said. “After I did, he kicked me out and didn’t want to see me. I heard he got tested and was negative, but I don’t know. Maybe he was shame; I hope not, though. No one should have to live with this.”

Paula had by then lost her job at RK’s and had found another job as a guard. She was staying with her daughter, but was shortly after asked to leave by an uncle who was living there. She suspects that she was “put out” due to her status, but the uncle claimed that it was because she “used to come home when I feel like, but that wasn’t the case; I was working”.

Back in the rental market again, Paula, with the support of a friend, rented a room for $7000 a month, but after a while, she could not keep up with the rent and sought comfort and boarding at the home of a friend on the highway.

“I had known her long, and she had always been a good friend. All of us would eat and drink from the same thing, yuh know.”

Paula amusingly recalled how quickly her friend’s attitude towards her changed after she had confessed her status to her. “Every time she give me food and so now was in plastic things, I can’t use her spoon nothing now.”
A week later, she was told she could no longer stay there. “She no longer felt comfortable; I was a walking disease, one she didn’t want walking around her house and touching her things.”

Paula’s life has since been lived in limbo. There were many days, she said, where the thought of ending her life seemed like the appropriate response. There was no one to love her, no one she could freely talk to, no one she could innocently touch without them instinctively pulling away from her.

Upon ending the interview, I asked Paula whether the thoughts of ending her life were still paramount. She shook her head in the negative, “Not as much as before, but I still do, because it’s a depressing thing to live with, an isolating thing, yuh know.”