At 54, Patricia Persaud seems to reflect on her life with great satisfaction. The ‘other half’ used to be in a union of two teacher-turned-farmers and part of the Parika Back farmer community whose activities were filled with challenges and rewards.
Patricia grew up on the farming island of Wakenaam then ’emigrated’ to Parika Back after leaving high school in the mid-1980s.
Pushed towards farming by the availability of sufficient farmland, he took an interest. Not surprisingly perhaps, a farmer got married a year after moving to Parika Back. Herself from a farming family took to her new life as a duck to water. She also felt that working in the fields alongside her husband was the best kind of support a wife could give. Teachers’ salaries were a ‘country mile’ away from being a king’s ransom, farming also represented an insignificant family subsidy. Both potatoes and cassava grew on a plot of land close to her mother-in-law’s residence and sold the produce to middle men.