Sick of school: Childhood, gender, and intergenerational change in Guyana

In August 2014, when I first arrived in Sand Creek village in Guyana to begin my fieldwork with Wapishana people, the secondary school was debilitatingly understaffed with only five teachers slated to teach over 200 students. As a result, the village council, upon approving my stay in the village, requested that I volunteer as an English teacher until the Ministry of Education sent relief teachers to the area. As my research topic was education and boarding schools, I agreed to the arrangement. I had been in Guyana for six weeks prior to finding my way to Sand Creek in South Central Rupununi, Region 9. On numerous occasions, after explaining my research, people I had encountered on the coast and in other parts of the Guyanese interior suggested I should be careful. They explained that Amerindian ¹ girls in these boarding schools throughout Guyana were getting what the locals called the sickness. Indeed, while I had heard about the sickness in passing prior to arriving in the village, I had assumed they were talking about malaria or some other physical illness.