A single guest cabin at Mainstay/Whyaka, an Amerindian village in Region Two has become three.
The riverside lodge fills most weekends now, and the profit has stretched further than anyone expected, financing repairs to other village buildings, upkeep for the school compound, and wages for the people who cook when guests arrive.
Minister of Amerindian Affairs Sarah Browne-Shadeek keeps coming back to Mainstay when she talks about her first year in office.
She said this is not because the numbers are the biggest, but because nobody in Georgetown told the village what to build.
“It’s a different village, different needs, different requests,” she said in an interview with the Department of Public Information (DPI).
Communities submit their own plans each year, an economic venture here, a cultural programme there, a recreation upgrade somewhere else, and the ministry funds what’s asked for.
“We just make the resources available and monito,” she explained further.
The money behind that principle is considerable.
More than $41 billion has reached Amerindian communities over the past five years, and the ministry’s own budget now sits at $7.5 billion. This increased from $200 million when Carolyn Rodrigues first held the post in the early 2000s.
Of the recent totals, $21 billion has moved through the Amerindian Development Fund, and $14 billion more through the Low Carbon Development Strategy, which skips the ministry entirely and lands straight in village bank accounts.
What villages do with it varies. Mabaruma used LCDS money to build guest houses that are booked solidly on most weekends. Others wired every household in the community, bought furniture, or put the funds into poultry and farming.
A Village General Meeting decides, and the decision does not need the government’s approval.
The Community Support Officer programme, meanwhile, has trained more than 2,000 youths ranging small engine repair, shade house management, cosmetology, and other trades that stick.
Some have moved into healthcare work, teaching, the public service. The stipend went up to $50,000 this year, and Santa Rosa is getting a rebuilt multipurpose centre with room for a beauty salon, a printing operation, and a recording studio.
Then there’s the Guyana Development Bank, where Indigenous youth can now borrow up to $3 million. A decade ago, a village’s entire yearly allocation was a $1 million presidential grant.
Minister Browne-Shadeek wants young people to pool that borrowing power into groups rather than chase it alone to invest in transportation ventures, especially, in places like Region Eight, where an ATV can be the only way in or out.
Not all of it comes down to money. The ministry is mid-consultation on revisions to the Amerindian Act, and she’s careful about how she frames it: additions, not subtractions.
“We are going to review the Amerindian Act, but only to bring more rights and more benefit to Indigenous people, not to take away any rights already enshrined in the Act.”
There’s a quieter admission underneath the achievements. Minister Browne-Shadeek is Lokono, raised in one of the largest Amerindian villages in the country, and she cannot speak the language of her own people.
“If I don’t tell my children at some point, that little that’s left will die with me,” she stated. The ministry is now in talks with the Ministry of Education about bringing Lokono into the primary school curriculum.
Ask her to grade the year, and she won’t. “I always want to do more, and I would never think that I’ve done enough. That’s what motivates me to want to do better today,” she said.