— Little Biaboo’s Grace Khan tells her story

By Shari Simon
NESTLED on the bank of the Mahaica River between the picturesque villages, ‘Handsome Tree’ and ‘Big Biaboo’, Grace Khan’s home sits on the edge of ‘Little Biaboo’ in Region Five (Mahaica-Berbice) surrounded by a fishing pond, an overladen lime tree, and a large farm of bora soon to be picked and sold to sustain her family.

“We do farming for a living,” Grace said. She is a 66-year-old native of the village, and daughter of 88-year-old, Zulaika Husein and 91-year-old, Shamir ‘Manuel’ Husein.
The ‘Manuel Canal’, a tributary of the Mahaica River that divides the villages of ‘Little Biaboo’ and ‘Big Biaboo’, runs beneath a wooden bridge separating the two villages.

Being the daughter of the eldest couple in the village, Grace related that it was her paternal great-grandfather, Gulam Husein, who was one of the first residents of that village.
Husein, called ‘Khanchan’, came from Cane Grove to Mahaica Creek and started cultivating rice to provide for his wife, Ogeran, and their seven children.

Husein and Ogeran’s son, Abdul Kadir, then married Zakeera Kadir and had nine children in total, including Shamir who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a rice farmer.

As a child, Grace recalled playing ‘jacks’ and ‘sal-out’, and helping her father who was working as a rice farmer, cattle farmer and dragline operator on the family estate. It’s not as yet clear how the canal was nicknamed after Grace’s father, Manuel.

“I’d help him too!” she gestured to her husband, Roshan, whom she would assist on the farm as they planted and harvested cash crops. “We plant bora, peppers, limes, pears, guavas and even psydium,” she noted.

Apart from earnestly tending to their family farm, Grace’s main responsibility, like many other women, rested on balancing household chores and providing daily care for her elderly parents who live nearby. She also cared for her daughter who has cerebral palsy and is also asthmatic.

“Life has been really tough having a child with an illness,” the mother of three shared, “but thank God she’s better now. Years gone back, she was really really sick.”
Earlier in her years, Grace was a nursery school teacher at the Biaboo Primary School, which back then had a section that held the nursery school.

“I’d spent around 12 years teaching,” recalled Grace. She eventually made the difficult decision to leave her teaching career behind, and enter a full-time responsibility of caring for her daughter.

FAITH AND FERVENT PRAYERS
A convert from Islam to Christianity, she enthusiastically remarked that it was actually her faith and fervent prayers that gave her the strength and courage to never give up despite the many challenges she faced along the way.

Caring for a child with cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder that affects a person’s ability to control his/her muscles, requires time, resources and unconditional love.

Grace knew that even though she loved teaching and admired the way children lit up in her classroom, being a mother meant creating and nurturing a safe-space for her daughter, Razia, to get unconditional love and support.
“Razia is 41 years old. She is smart, but her physical strength isn’t there. She loves to play games on the phone and she likes to ‘gaff’. She is very loving and helpful,” Grace said.

Because of the lack of special education and facilities for persons living with a disability at the time, Grace would teach Razia to read and write at home.
On days when her daughter was seriously ill, Grace reflected on how difficult it was to access transportation, stating that they had to take a boat to leave the village to make steady hospital visits.

Fortunately, in recent times, the village has seen continuous development with improvements to its potable water supply, electricity system, internet services and roadway.
In Grace’s childhood, a ‘paddle canoe’ was usually the main transportation mode among households.

Today, Grace, who is now a pensioner, spends a lot of time knitting chair back coverings and tablecloths.
Early in the morning, she likes reading the daily newspapers online instead of going to the Mahaica market to buy the hardcopy papers.

She enjoys eating a delicious plate of stew chicken, pot-roast chicken and chowmein with a glass of cold lime wash or swank.

When her younger daughter comes to visit, she enjoys watching her grandchildren play a good game of cricket in the sun and hopes that a playground can be built for children in the village to engage in different recreational activities and a computer facility constructed to support improving the literacy rate of youths.

With no regrets about the decision she made to sacrifice her teaching career to fulfil her role as a devoted mother, Grace is determined to remain resilient and, no doubt, truly exemplifies the meaning of her name, “the free and unmerited favour granted by God.”