‘Life in Dog Point is no walk in the park’

Residents of Dog Point, a village, located less than four miles from the gold mining hub of Bartica, survive without water or electricity. In fact, their only means of livelihood is cassava bread. Svetlana Marshall recently travelled to the village and spoke with residents about how they manage to eke out a living.

By Svetlana Marshall
Greys have now replaced the beautiful black hair she remembers having as a young girl living in Guyana’s northwest district. She still wears it loose today though, and uses her upper arm to swipe

away the strands the breeze sends to bother her careful gave on the grater.
The predominance of wrinkles across her face and arms too makes it clear that this is not the same woman who cultivated her own cassava plantation and drugged the roots on her back for hours to where she would later process it to make the flat bread delicacy that is the staple food in Amerindian homes.
I meet Iris Sutton under a tent attached to the shack at Dog Point, where she now calls home. I can’t tell her age, and she is none the wiser, having no birth certificate.
Her face leans toward the basin, as she applies all the energy she could muster to grate the cassava. The bread she would later make from it is what she would eat and also sell to passersby.
It’s all she can do these days. Up to one year ago, before arthritis got the better of her joints, Iris would travel the three and a half miles to Bartica – the central business hub of Region Seven – where she would stand on the side of the road and sell the cassava bread. Then, from the 100 pounds of grated cassava, she would make an average of 20 cakes of cassava bread, but now she can only muster about 10-12 cakes, selling them whenever she gets a customer for just $400 a cake.

Iris is among scores of Dog Point residents who depend on cassava for a living. In a small wooden cottage, just a stone throw away from where she operates, her 43-year-old daughter-in-law Sandrine Lindore cultivates a small plot of cassava plant, both bitter and sweet.
Once harvested, Lindore, like her mother-in-law in her healthier years, would trek close to four miles to sell her sweet cassava on the streets of Central Bartica. But it’s the “bitter sticks” she depends on to make her cassava bread – grating approximately 100 pounds at a time.
Single handedly, the mother of one grates the “bitter stick” before placing the cassava meal into a matapee – a flexible basket in the form of a cylinder used to squeeze the poisonous juice out of the cassava meal.
“I would leave it over the fire to dry for three days before I sift it using a sifter,” Lindore says in explaining the process that has become almost a daily ritual.

Once sifted, the cassava meal is placed on a huge tawa (or flat baking pan) and baked in the open.
The fact that she bakes close to 40 cakes of cassava bread with little or no help is not the most fascinating thing; what is fascinating is the fact that Lindore, like Irish, has used the shells of three kerosene stoves and old pots to create a stove of her own. When she is ready to bake or cook, she would just add fire sticks to the center of the makeshift stove and set it afire.
Lindore’s husband, who works in the interior, helps her to sustain the family, but Denise Chacon said “life in Dog Point is no walk in the park.”
For Chacon, keeping her two sons in the school is a major challenge. “I sell cassava bread for a living but when sales down it does be real hard pun we because we don’t get to send we children to school,” she says, using Guyana Creole refrain to explain that the low cassava robs her of the money needed to educate her family.

“Sometime you get the cassava sell good out there, sometimes you don’t…I usually take a 20 cake very day to Bartica and sell pun a table but most times I only get 17 sell,” she laments.
It is no secret that Dog Point has been cut off from development – for it lacks basic necessities ranging from electricity to potable water.
Sixty-one-year-old Morris Francis, who also plants cassava, says several years ago, a road was built through self-help but it needs upgrading. “We currently have a road stemming from the Agatash Public Road but we would like to have it developed,” says Francis, an Amerindian of the Carib nation.

For many years, the community has not had potable water. Though he cannot remember the exact year, Francis says the water authority had installed a solar pipe system but that has stopped working.
“We use to enjoy getting here,” he says, pointing to the standpipe. Now they depend on creeks but the creeks are now dried up as a result of the ongoing dry spell.
Francis’ house is powered with electricity from a solar panel he received through a government programme but other residents are not as fortunate as him, hence there is a general lack of electricity. “We need more farm lands and even land to live on,” he added.
There is no health centre, recreational facility or even a school situated in Dog Point and as such life for Kowsilla Dieram and her three children is made difficult.
“Buses don’t normally come in here. During school time you would find one or two, but it’s tough on them children because they would have to walk until they get a bus.”