GUYANA

READ

The book I chose to read for the South American country of Guyana was Frangipani House, by Beryl Gilroy. It’s the story of Mama King, an elderly woman whose family has moved away from her and from Guyana. Since they are not there to take care of her, they put her in a nursing home for women called Frangipani House.

Mama King is not happy there. She dislikes Olga Trask – Matron – who runs Frangipani House. Matron is described as “a comely, honey-brown predator of a woman.” After having been a strong, independent woman all her life, Mama King feels that “now, time and life, her daughters and the matron had all conspired to deprive her of her faithful friends, work and hardship.”

During her time at Frangipani House, Mama King is often lost in dreams and reminiscences. She dreams about her husband Danny, who disappeared when she was pregnant with their second child. She thinks of her two daughters, who now live in the United States, and worries about whether she was so caught up in working to keep them housed, clothed, and fed that she neglected to show them enough love. She has happy memories of her grandchildren, whom she helped raise so their mothers could work, but bitter memories about having those same grandchildren taken away from her care when their mothers no longer needed her help.

Eventually, Mama King decides she’s had enough of Frangipani House and makes a plan to escape. Her children and grandchildren must then come together to decide what to do. Ultimately, however, Mama King decides her own destiny.

COOK

Yams are a staple of Guyanese cuisine, and they play a part in one of Mama King’s happier reminiscences: “She used to walk with Danny and then run fast across the field. He could never catch her. Life was good in those days. Laughing was easy. Tilley came in the yard with her six and in next to no time, they would build a fire and roast yam and potatoes and corn. Then Ben would banjo and the children would dance for pennies.”

I looked online for Guyanese recipes featuring sweet potatoes or yams and found one for sweet potato cakes on the Guyana Outpost website. The only change that needed to be done to veganize the recipe was to use an egg replacer instead of the egg. The sweet potato cakes were delicious, and I would definitely make them again.

GIVE

The GlobalGiving website listed four projects for Guyana. In honor of Mama King, I would have liked to donate to a project helping Guyanese seniors, but that wasn’t one of the options. Instead, I chose an organization that provides free air ambulance services to remote areas of Guyana. According to the project description: “Since 2001, Remote Area Medical (RAM) has provided a free air ambulance to thousands of Amerindian villagers in remote Guyana. In this isolated region, RAM's air ambulance is often a person's only access to medical care, making the difference between life and death. RAM flies its Cessna 206 into 28 different airfields to transport villagers to facilities for vital care.” More information about this project is available at https://www.globalgiving.org/projects/support-free-air-ambulance-in-remote-guyana/.

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