Seven years after she travelled to the remote village of Yupukari in Region Nine (Upper Takutu-Upper Essequibo) after being awarded a scholarship for a Study Abroad Programme, Jennifer Bucolo, a licensed social worker, returned for a visit but ended up falling in love and months later married Guyanese Jenkins Lawrence and made the village her home.
Jennifer Lawrence does not regret making that bold move. She sees the village as one filled with potential as she envisions helping women and girls to go after their dreams and empowering them.
She was reading for her Bachelor’s Degree in Sociology, Social Change and Environmental Science at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, US, when she was granted the scholarship to come to Guyana. She recalled at that time she was a teacher’s assistant for an honour’s course when she met with the president of the university and requested something different, but she suggested coming to Guyana. She applied for the scholarship and was successful.
Lawrence spent three months in Yupukari during which she took classes as her professors were there and they did credited courses for environmental science. It was a small group of four students and they exchanged their cultures with the villagers.
She described it as a great experience which opened up her world to Guyana and the Lawrence family that she ended up falling in love with.
On her return she remained friends with one of the students who was also on the programme and it was while she was working as a licensed social worker that the friend invited her to return to Guyana for a visit.
“I was going through a lot of life changes at that time. I was a social worker with the state government … and my stepbrother had passed away also. So it was kind of a whirlwind of events happening in my life that led me to make the decision to… go back and see how they were doing and reconnect,” she said.
“So it was a blessing that she asked me to return for a couple of months and then that was it…,” she said, laughing as those ‘couple of months’ have now turned to years which will continue as she has no intention of returning to the US permanently.
Her return in 2018 was part of her own healing, she said, as travelling has always been therapy for her.
Now that she has made Guyana her home, Lawrence, who spoke to the Stabroek Weekend virtually during a short visit back to the US, said that she is very interested in women in business and technology even though this initiative is hamstrung by poor internet access here. There is only the government wifi available and just so much that could be done with this.
She wants women and children in the region to be able to access higher education online and at present her focus is on building programmes and reaching out to other people who are interested in women and children and the arts and sciences and giving them a proper platform to do research instead of just focusing on social media. She would like them to be able to get degrees or some form of training online to increase their quality of life.
“I have a lot of business ideas going on and … for educational programmes that I would like to bring to my village essentially…but I would need some internet to start with and that is like one million Guyana dollars to start and the only problem right now is getting … a grant,” she said.
She hopes to build partnerships with other like-minded people in linking the villagers with higher education and furthering their opportunities for better employment and growth as this will improve their quality of life.
“So I am looking for partners. I am looking for collaborators. I am looking for investors who want to make charitable donations to a US$5,000 infrastructure [which] is literally where we would start,” she said.
She hopes to teach courses to women on financial independence and give them the opportunity to go beyond social media as most of them are stuck on Facebook. The other challenge is the fact that there is no electricity grid and the community depends on solar power.
While she has a lot of business ideas none have come to fruition but she volunteers with Guyana Truly Wild, which takes tourists on trips in the interior and Save the Giants, a non-profit organisation that looks at helping animals and people and women’s potential. Her husband works with the organisation as a licensed boat captain and he is also well versed in wild animals.
The COVID-19 restrictions have seen her and others working along with the children in the community, sending them at-home arts and craft and science projects to complete.
Love blooms
Lawrence met her husband’s family during her first visit, but not him as he was away on work duties. During her second visit, she met him while standing in his family’s kitchen. At the time he worked as a ranger with the Protected Areas Commission, and had just gotten home. Lawrence recalled that she hugged him but did not “think anything of it. He was just my friend’s brother. It was just like a family friend at first and then you start spending more time and you go on these adventures and then you go swimming together and fishing and hiking and whatever it is and a love story just started.”
She said the love story bloomed from there and even though they have opposite cultures they are still able to find that “unconditional love for one another”. She loves travelling and enjoying new cultures and believes that people are not that different.
Lawrence admitted, however, that her family was shocked when she called and gave them the news as they did not want her to make the wrong decision or jump into anything too quickly but she had their support as they always knew that she did not really want to stay in the US.
Her second trip to Guyana was in August 2018 and she remained for two months, then returned to the US for two weeks and that was when she made the decision that “I am moving back down south and we are going to start this amazing life together and I don’t know how it is going to go. I don’t have a job. I don’t have internet or electricity but we are going to see how it goes…”
Around that time the couple started ordering the material for their house and they slowly started building a life and a house together.
The permanent move was in late 2018 and she spent her first Christmas in Yupukari. But sadly when she and Jenkins married, none of her relatives were present owing to COVID-19. However, she said, “it went well and it turned out to be a beautiful ceremony”.
It has not been all smooth sailing. Lawrence admitted that Guyana can still be shocking at times and it took her about six months to understand her village and the culture of the region.
Going through the changes of language and food among others was challenging and as Lawrence put it, there was some “turbulence there” initially. She had to find a way to get some of the things she wanted, for example making her own pizza as part of the main diet of the residents is fish. She changed to accommodate the local diet, but makes some of the foods she likes.
She has spent time in Georgetown, and to her it feels like a different country. What she finds interesting is that many people she speaks to in the city have never visited the area where she lives. While she is a ‘city girl,’ she loves nature and privacy and “having that little house in the country is really appealing to me at this time”.
Lawrence hopes she will be able to share her culture with her husband soon as he has never visited the US.
“I want him to experience different food, different clothing, different music, all of those things… and, of course, eventually, I would love for him to join me here whether that is for working or for a visit… just to see it and maybe to get the chance to work here might be really great for his exposure,” she said.
As she looks to the future, Lawrence sees Yupukari as her home. As she puts it, she could have been in the US with a well-paid job but would have been empty inside. Lawrence can be contacted at realgemstudios@gmail.com and she and her husband can also be found on Instagram @jenkins_lawrence_.
