Although never an athlete or a sports fanatic, community activist Debra Daniels is now using sports and recreation as the vehicle for the development of young people.

Daniels, 34, calls herself the “self-appointed caretaker” of young people in her community of Zorg, on the Essequibo Coast.

“Today I am waist deep, maybe, going to the neck deep in sports. I am into coaching of athletes and I do the secretarial and management of groups under my purview,” Daniels told Stabroek Weekend in a recent telephone interview.

The sports organiser on the Essequibo Coast, who is employed by the National Sports Commission (NSC), Daniels is a certified athletic coach, a level one table tennis coach and a level one cricket coach and, maybe, the only certified female cricket coach on the Essequibo Coast.

She says she follows in the footsteps of her paternal grandmother in her community work and, maybe, like her father who is a cricket coach.

“Growing up, my grandmother, Elaine Daniels or Cousin Rose, as she was called, was always giving the young people activities to do, so as to motivate them in a positive direction and away from delinquent behavior. She was no specialist but she shared her skills in cooking, baking and sewing with the neighbourhood’s children. Some of them have been making good use of the skills, she gave them. She was my inspiration, more so as I became a parent. If I wanted change in behavior, I had to become involved.”

Daniels is an electrical technician, plumber and cosmetologist by training who does her own installations, fixtures and repairs and does not turn away anyone when her help is needed.

A past student of Anna Regina Multilateral School (ARMS) and the Guyana Technical Institute (GTI), Daniels said, “I was not fun at school. I became involved

in sports after I voluntarily took on the role of supervising the younger children who came to play cricket and other sporting activities at Zorg Ballfield.”

Although she is still young herself, Daniels has already experienced a number of professional reinventions. After leaving ARMS, she pursued studies at GTI, where she completed a programme in electrical installation and was certified an industrial technician. She was subsequently taken on as an apprentice with the Guyana Power and Light (GPL) at Versailles on the West Bank Demerara and subsequently joined the staff as a power station operator and she worked there from 2003 to 2009. After the old Versailles power station was decommissioned, Daniels was retrenched. She then worked with a friend at a café while pursuing a course in cosmetology for which she was certified. At this time she was living at Den Amstel on the West Coast of Demerara (WCD).

In 2011, she was called back to work with GPL as a loss reduction technician but she had to travel from the WCD to Georgetown every work day and it was not easy. She had her children’s welfare to consider.

She was in a broken marital relationship and in 2013 she returned home on the Essequibo Coast, where she invested in poultry focusing on meat birds and layers. This meant hard work, travelling to get supplies but she was contented that she was earning a livelihood and her parents were there to assist with the care of her children.

It was back on the Essequibo Coast that she became involved in “the management” of sports groups and giving herself the title of “self-appointed caretaker” for the children and then as chaperone for the male under-15 Essequibo cricket team.

The Vanskinimites, Maypole dancing

She continued, “I live across the way from the ballfield and I noticed the children in the older age groups were always hogging the playfield and I saw potential in the younger ones. The younger ones are usually excluded but they, too, have lots of potential that you could recognize from early,” said the mother of three children, ages 13, 10 and three.

She saw the need for recreational activities for the

younger children to keep them occupied and to help them develop healthy bodies and inquiring minds.

She then started organising activities for the younger children, including hers, with the support of the mothers in the area.

Even before she was appointed the sports organiser for the Essequibo Coast, she said, “I began working with a group of girls from six to 16 years and their mothers in recreational activities in what we call the ‘forgotten sports.’”

The group, which has a membership of over 20, is called ‘The Vanskinimites’ as was suggested by one of the younger members, who noted that the children were often referred to by that name in a loving way for their frivolities by the older folks.

“We have a beautiful beach at Zorg and there we go to play the forgotten sports like ‘Saul out’ or ‘Saul call’, Dog and the Bone, Four Posts, [and] circle tennis among others. We would also make up our own games as we go along. The mothers work along with us and often a few of them would join in.”

In 2017 she reintroduced the plaiting of Maypole Dancing at Zorg ballfield, training the children as an afternoon activity. In her childhood she was among the children who was always involved in the plaiting the maypole. It was one of the traditional European cultures which had been slowing dying and she saw it as an opportunity to revive it. She held the first plaiting of the maypole in 2017 but stopped the activity last year due to COVID-19. The children and the older folks have welcomed the revival of the plaiting of the maypole and it is another activity she plans to continue once the pandemic is over.

Becoming everybody’s Aunt Debbie

One day in 2014, when she was reading the newspapers, Daniels saw an NSC advertisement for the position of sports organizer for the Essequibo Coast. She said to herself, “This is what I am doing. I am just not being paid to do it. If I get this job, I will have greater reach and get more youths involved.”

She applied and got the position.

With her appointment as sports organizer, she said, “There was this expectation that I can help young people in so many ways. I am suddenly everybody’s Auntie Debbie. I never expected it to come to that. So I now have to live up to some expectations. I can’t give up even when frustration wants to get the better of me.”

Frustration, she said, sometimes takes hold of her when the children train “very hard” to get involved in inter-county sports, excel and then they are not recognized or cannot go beyond Essequibo in spite of their performance.

It also gets to her, she said, when girls do well and cannot go further because of labelling.

“Sports in Essequibo is seen a man’s thing,” she said. “If women are involved in sports, they are seen as lesbians. There is only so much you can do and these kinds of taboos have to be broken. So far, I have not given up and I don’t plan to give up.”

Daniels fell for sports after travelling with a group of young cricketers as their chaperone from Zorg to other places on the Essequibo Coast and out of Region Two.

Since then she had begun making her mark along the Essequibo Coast until Covid-19 brought the activities to a standstill in 2019.

One of the first things she did as sports organiser was to organise inter-dormitory circle tennis competitions, in collaboration with Region Two Department of Education, for both boys and girls on the Essequibo Coast. Essequibo has three secondary schools with dormitories, Anna Regina Multilateral, Aurora Secondary and Charity Secondary. She is eager to restart the competitions.

Cricket is the game of Essequibians and though she does not play it, Daniels in the manager of the Essequibo Coast female team and she continues to work with the Under 15 males in the South Essequibo cricket area.

However, she manages her own female cricket team called ‘Dee’s Angels.’ She said that most of the female cricketers who represent Essequibo come from her team. She is the secretary for the group and does all its administrative work. Even though the members of Dee’s Angels are in the majority, she said, with the production of a new constitution, the group has not been given a vote so the group has no voice in the South Essequibo Cricket Committee (SECC). However, she said, the members continue to meet and to train at the beach and they do not take part in any activities that is not sanctioned by the SECC.

Other sports and counselling

She has also noted, she said, that the area has a lot of naturally talented track and field athletes but the region does not have the resources to develop their talent and they are bypassed.

She has seen her father, Forbes Daniels, one of two of the Guyana Cricket Board coaches on the Essequibo Coast, who has literally cried when coming out of inter country cricket tournaments his cricketers were not given the chance for exposure beyond Guyana’s borders.

Coming out of Aurora Secondary School, she noted, was Essequibo cricketer Quentin Sampson, whose position on the Guyana team she felt should have already been a sealed deal.

She speaks up when she sees things are not going right in her opinion and her father would remind her that she is “stubborn like her grandmother.”

As a coach, she said, she is also seen as a counsellor and she is often called on to give advice. On Zorg beach, she said, they discuss current events and topical issues. In recent years, she said, one of the young women who was training with her told her she wanted to take her own life as she was

being abused but her mother was not taking her on. Through Daniels’ intervention the young woman sought and was given professional help. She now has her own small business and is away from the source of the abuse.

Another group she is looking forward to working with, once the threat of the pandemic has passed, is with the “differently talented” or differently abled.

At present she is also introducing table tennis to a number of young players. She has a structured programme in place to get her players to compete at the national level.

She is thankful to donors on the Essequibo Coast and other places, such as Andy Medas-King, who have been making contributions to schools involved in sports and to the sporting fraternity in

Essequibo to develop the talent.

“Our schools, our areas, [and] our region are always in need of sports gears.”

It is not easy being involved in sports as a young woman, she said. She has been given the “fight down by one or two men who feel she does not belong. Not all. I get good support from sportsmen.”

She said, “I am learning, and in the hard way too, but I am up for the challenge. People will envy you when they see that you are trying to do good for yourself and for those you love and care about. The police came and ransacked my home looking for drugs because someone told them I do drugs.

I don’t do drugs. I will not do anything illegal, knowingly.”