Chronicle Pepperpot March 2, 2014
Lynette Carter: Country girl comes to town and excels
“You had to learn the job in the GPF from scratch because country girl come to town, you don’t know Georgetown and you have no relatives here so I had to live in the Bark Room which was near to where I worked.” By Telesha Ramnarine EACH and every one of the ten children was given a small bag with rice to distribute to the needy following the reaping of the ‘big’ crop in September and perhaps this act of kindness is responsible for the job that Lynette Carter eventually took up in her life. After retiring from the Guyana Police Force (GPF) with 36 years of service, she finally found what it was that she really wanted to do LYNETTE with her time. She is currently the CARTER Administrative Officer of the Guyana Relief Council (GRC). She sent out several applications as a youth, but only the GPF would respond to her and so she took what came her way. Not to say that she regrets her years in the Force, but now she is doing something that brings meaning to her life each day. Ms. Carter, 67, grew up on the Island of Leguan in the Essequibo River but moved to Georgetown to attend secondary school at the Guyana Oriental College. Before moving to Georgetown, she attended what is now the Success Primary School in Leguan, formerly known as the Canadian Mission (CM) School. After successfully completing her secondary school studies, she returned home and wrote several
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applications for work to agencies in Georgetown as Leguan, being primarily a farming community, did not have the opportunities. She was accepted in the GPF in 1966 and worked there until 2002. “You had to learn the job in the GPF from scratch because country girl come to town, you don’t know Georgetown and you have no relatives here so I had to live in the Bark Room which was near to where I worked,” she recalled. She was promoted until she reached the rank of sergeant. But things did not go too well in the Force at this time, she said, and so she had to remain a sergeant for quite some time. After being there for so long and not being promoted, she decided to pursue Industrial and Social Studies at the Critchlow Labour College which subsequently allowed her to gain entry into the University of Guyana (UG). “I did a degree in management and I can safely say that I was the first police woman to get a degree in those days because the opportunities were there but you had to go out and take them.” To facilitate the studies at UG, she recalled that a Government of Guyana Scholarship aided her so that she was able to attend the university fulltime. “Fortunately for me, I did not have to do national service so I finished the degree in four years. I went back to the Force and was given accelerated promotion from a sergeant to an Assistant
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