AT 13, AN ADULT man in her own home gave Jelani (not her real name) an experience which would push her early into taking on the responsibilities of a woman. Now at the age of 28, she has pulled herself together and has become a mother, standing boldly in defense of her five daughters and creating a change.
Becoming a school drop-out and a drug trafficker at the age of 13, she now sits in her home breaking cycles in a bid to offer her girls, whose ages range from four to 11, a fair chance at education and the childhood life they deserve.
It was difficult for years even as she shared the children with four different men searching for love, and a partner who could in her life, be the father she never knew and husband she hoped for.
Jelani’s father was murdered when she was just a baby and her mom would migrate permanently to the United States of America (USA) leaving her in the care of a family friend. For 13 years, the woman whom she first consciously knew as “Mommy” and her husband “Daddy” along with their seven children together were very kind to her and ensured she benefitted well from whatever cash and goodies her mother would have posted.
She felt all good in the home in a village in East Demerara but close relatives of her mom talked her into housing the girl at another relative in Alberttown, Georgetown. Taking the advice, she was transferred to a private city school and moved to the city with the relatives. Her new foster mother worked as a businesswoman in the downtown arcade and would leave on a daily basis for work. She had a daughter in her older teens, a younger son, and another son in his twenties. This is where Jelani’s ugly transforming experiences began.
She would then be placed among the ‘good girl gone bad’ bracket after repeated encounters with the adult cousin in his twenties with every chance he got.
“It’s so much that I don’t know what to say,” she told the Guyana Chronicle. She continued, “I was a baby. At that time he was probably touching he twenties. He did it often, when they are not around. He would send he brother to go and play and he would turn the music up so nobody can’t hear what’s going on.”
It started not long after she had moved into the home and he raped her at every chance he got.
That would be her first of several abusers and with each experience she felt like she would have died again and a little bit more. She complained to her older cousin, the man’s mother, but instead of investigating, the woman not only whipped her heartlessly but verbally abused her viciously, labelling her with words of immorally. Apart from such constant abuse from both parties, the woman began to covet her gifts for her own children. “I couldn’t be on my own computer because my mother used to send these things just to make me comfortable and I couldn’t be on them.”
By this time, a sense of worthlessness stepped in and she felt too weak and scorned to hold her head high, slouching as echoes of horror tormented her teenage mind. There was now no one to turn to, none in her family she could trust. Then one day as she was walking to school in mental torment, a big man saw her crying and enquired why she was so sad.
He was driving a fancy car. He stopped to listen. And a new chapter in her life began.
The man used the opportunity to make her his mule, and still 13-years-old she began trafficking cocaine and marijuana to specifically assigned areas with the task of getting all the merchandise sold.
“That’s when things changed. I was tough. I had to go off my own to look for everything. I begin to start selling weed, start selling cocaine. I had to drop out of school. I went all over with he,” she told the Guyana Chronicle. For days she watched a missing person’s report of herself on national television as she moved into the big man’s home and her response was a burst of laughter as she began to feel a freedom she needed from the abusive household. She did not mind at that age, becoming the man’s reputed wife. Even though it is illegal for a child to be somebody’s wife and he could have been charged with statutory rape or having carnal knowledge of a 13-year-old, it was her only option of escape at the time and she was unaware of the additional trouble in which she had been placed.
The run-away teen’s joy was short-lived while she shared the home with the drug dealer with whom she now had an affair, and his extended family.
It started from the first day she was not able to sell all of the illegal drugs which were entrusted her for the purpose of trafficking and marketing. “Nothing wasn’t bothering me there. I was searching for love. I wasn’t finding love. There wasn’t anybody there (at her relative’s home) that was giving me any love so I had to go and have an experience of what love was about. But instead of getting love, I (was) being abused. Love turned out to be an abused love,” she recalled with sadness printed all over her face.
“When the stuff ain’t sell out how it supposed to, he used to have me and then he used to beat me.”
The drug dealer, whom she described as a ‘big man’ battered the teen with his bare hand, throwing slaps and punches at regular intervals, and ‘black and blue eyes’ had taken almost a permanent fixture on her pretty dark face.
Eventually, she would escape and break into an empty house back in the countryside, where her mother and extended family once lived. She was 14-years-old already, and now had no other choice but to live on her own.
Pitfalls continued and a dancehall life brewed while she smoked marijuana and consumed alcohol and exchanged sexual intercourse with men to earn a living. The woman whom she called ‘Mommy” was in her life again, this time providing food, while she had already adopted a new lifestyle and had become unstoppable at the time.
Defending herself in verbal and literal battles, she had become one to fear as she now had yielded to the use of weapons to defend her vulnerable life.
She gave birth to her first daughter at the age of 16 but did it all alone since the man responsible for her pregnancy had abandoned her. “I had nowhere else to go, nobody else to turn to. Nuff of me other families them would treat me the same. I survived by the mercies of God,” with “Mommy” giving her a few things, but sex had become her new sanctuary.
“I didn’t go for children. I jus go to free meself from what I was going through. Free from pain. But at the end of the day it didn’t pay off. I became pregnant and gave birth to my children who I choose to give birth to,” she confessed to the Guyana Chronicle.
Her five children are for four different men and she did not achieve things easily to care for the girls. But, she never quit her role as their mother, even though she had been obsessed with the thought of suicide.
Now she has developed a strong relationship with her biological mother who still helps, while she finds it difficult to leave her children and enter into the world of work since she prefers watching over them at every chance she gets.
This woman, on International Women’s Day 2017, is advising women living in abusive circumstances to “walk out of the situation and depend on God. You don’t have to kill yourself. Be strong. Depend on God. Ain’t nothing too difficult for God to do.”
“I think parents need to have a relationship with their children so it wouldn’t lead a child astray to suffer. They need to have conversations. A child mustn’t be afraid to tell parents anything instead of going to a friend (instead). That is how I see parents supposed to be,” she advised further.
Jelani said while in earlier times she thought of her children as mistakes she had later come to realize that they never were.
“But my children and me are one army, a mighty army. They are special and they have been chosen by God,” she told the Guyana Chronicle.