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By Kejal Vyas
MAHDIA, Guyana—Years ago, education officials in this remote mining town installed metal bars on the windows of the high school’s dormitory partly to keep girls and boys from being preyed upon in a town known for parties, nightclubs and brothels frequented by local gold miners.
But the grates and padlocked doors meant to protect students instead helped seal their fate as fire tore through the girls facility one night in late May, killing 20, mostly indigenous girls from far-flung hamlets served by the school.
Their bodies were so badly incinerated that authorities in this impoverished South American nation had to send DNA samples to New York to identify the victims.
The tragedy rocked the small, South American country where poverty and child sexual exploitation remain entrenched in its lawless mining regions, even as Guyana has transformed into the world’s fastest-growing economy thanks to an Exxon Mobil-led consortium’s offshore oil discoveries.
“I really thought that that was the best place for my child to have an opportunity and have someone look over her,” said Monica Roberts, whose 13-year-old daughter, Lisa, perished in the fire. “But it was like a jail.”
Police recovered Lisa’s charred skull from the rubble. “There was no flesh, no nothing,” her mother said.
Metal bars were installed on the dorm windows years ago after more than a dozen girls ended up pregnant. PHOTO: KEJAL VYAS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
The deaths of 19 girls aged 12 to 17, as well as the 5-year-old son of a dorm caretaker, spotlight the continuing challenges of education and child protection in hamlets near the informal mines that pockmark the country’s rugged hinterland, said the United Nations, officials and youth-advocacy groups. Gold made up about 9% of Guyana’s economic output in 2021, and businessmen from the mining sector have long been major political contributors, according to former and current government officials.
For decades, the gold deposits around Mahdia have drawn members of indigenous communities, young men from Guyana’s Atlantic coast, as well as Brazilian and Venezuelan wildcat miners who pay indigenous councils a 10% cut of their haul, according to Cornel Edwards, a 70-year-old toshao, or local chieftain. Some of those men have long flocked to Mahdia for booze and sex after toiling in mud pits hunting for gold, local government and residents say.
The town’s Mahdia Secondary School is the only high school in the area serving several indigenous hamlets, some accessible only by jungle trails and canoe rides. Many students board there during the school year. It provided opportunities poor children otherwise wouldn’t have, said Deborah Bellarmine, whose 17-year-old daughter Natalie died in the fire, just weeks before finishing her final school year.
“I told her, ‘Go make something of yourself, don’t be like your sisters just making babies,’” said Bellarmine, whose daughter was identified only by marks on her teeth. “She told me, ‘Mommy, I’ll try my best.’”
Students visiting a makeshift cemetery where some victims of the fire were buried. PHOTO: KEJAL VYAS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Cornel Edwards, chieftain of a hamlet that was home to 11 of the girls who died in the fire, said that miners prey on children for sexual favors. PHOTO: KEJAL VYAS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Benedict Roberts, a miner who lost his 13-year-old daughter, Andrea, in the fire, said he never had a problem with the metal bars and padlocked doors at the school dorm. Three of his older daughters had already passed through there, he said, and the security kept the students from leaving the dorm at night.
But the dorm lacked fire alarms and an escape route, and counted on a small staff of watchmen and teachers with little training, said town officials. In the chaos on the night of the May 21 fire, firefighters scrambled in the dimly lighted streets to find a hose long enough to deliver water, while first responders struggled to ram doors open before hammering a hole into a wall to pull out survivors.
School dropout rates in Guyana are high, educators said. Girls who get pregnant are usually removed from classes until they give birth, but few of the young mothers resume their education. Many teachers struggle on salaries of $350 a month. Many teachers and students, both boys and girls, mine or do odd jobs like cooking on mining sites for extra income.
The regional representatives for the Education Ministry, which operates the school, declined to comment and referred questions to Peter Ramotar, executive officer for Guyana’s gold-rich Potaro-Siparuni Region, where Mahdia is located.
Ramotar said what happened was a nightmare but the school struggled to provide education to rural communities and applying security measures for students on a tight budget.
This month, a 15-year-old girl appeared before a judge in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown, to face 20 counts of murder for allegedly starting the fire. Police said they were investigating whether it was an act of anger after a teacher seized her cellphone. Dorm caretakers said phones were routinely taken away at night to prevent girls from communicating with men in the town.
Edwards, the chieftain from the nearby hamlet of Micobie, home to 11 of the girls who died in the fire, said that miners preying on children for sexual favors has been a continuing problem. More than a dozen girls at the Mahdia dorm got pregnant in the span of a few months several years ago, school staff said.
“We’re talking about little girls, they get offered a little jewelry or some phone, and they become theirs,” said Edwards, whose family was hit especially hard as five of those killed were granddaughters and great-granddaughters. “It’s a real challenge for us because it happens so often.”
Yesim Oruc, the U.N.’s resident country coordinator, said government agencies and nonprofits have increased training of teachers and law officials in Guyana about child-protective measures in recent years. But enforcement in remote communities remains difficult, she said. Spotty phone service in rural mining areas, for example, has limited the efficacy of hotlines that the government formed for victims to report sex trafficking and exploitation, according to the U.S. State Department.
“I can fathom the reasons” why the dorm doors were locked, said Oruc. “It has a lot to do with male behavior and attitudes towards women.”
The road connecting Mahdia to Micobie runs alongside a number of informal gold-mining operations. PHOTO: KEJAL VYAS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
This mother of six children in the indigenous hamlet of Micobie lost her 13-year-old daughter in the dorm fire. PHOTO: KEJAL VYAS / THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
During the days, families and children stroll the sunbaked streets of Mahdia, which are filled with gold traders and mining-equipment shops. By night, street vendors sell shots of rum and vodka from carts while Jamaican dance hall and Spanish reggaeton music echoes from clubs and bars.
Prostitution is illegal in Guyana, and the age of consent is 16 years, but there is little enforcement in remote areas. Scantily clad women hunch off balconies to attract patrons. At one of the few hotels, a receptionist offered a one-word response when asked what there was to do in town: “Girls.”
The government offered families a settlement of $25,000 per victim while a state commission investigates the circumstances that led to the tragedy, according to the attorney general. The main opposition party in parliament in a statement called the payout an effort by the government to sidestep accountability for failing to provide safe housing for school children.
After the fire, several teachers left the community to seek psychological help. Many of the parents of students who survived the fire said they won’t send their children back. Many students said they preferred to mine for gold rather than study, because it offers immediate payoff and can help support their families.
Children being lured into dangerous mining work and child prostitution in lawless mining regions are common in other countries in South America, including Ecuador and Colombia, according to a U.S. Labor Department report from 2021. In 2017, Unicef published a tool kit for industrial mining firms, offering guidelines on how to train workers at large-scale as well as smaller companies that buy gold from individual miners on the risks of children forced into sex work in mining areas.
But police and regulators in remote areas like Mahdia are often understaffed, leaving many of those risks unaddressed, said Ayodele Dalgety-Dean, director of Blossom Inc., a nonprofit child-protection group.
“It boils my blood because instead of prevention and sexual education, students are locked up behind bars,” said Dalgety-Dean.
Her organization works with the state child-services agency and had run a youth counseling group in Mahdia that included five of the girls who died in the fire. “Mining towns are not safe spaces for children,” she said.
Ramotar said he was hopeful that the country’s oil windfall in the coming years would help boost education, healthcare and infrastructure for indigenous communities, about 10% of Guyana’s total population of 800,000.
Education spending accounts for 12% of the government’s nearly $4 billion budget for 2023, according to the Finance Ministry. The government has also earmarked 15% of the funds that it is slated to receive from the sale of carbon credits to support indigenous areas, which would amount to about $400 million over the next several years.
David Adams, mayor of Mahdia and a restaurant owner who catered for the school, was skeptical that development money would make it to his community after what he said were many broken promises from officials since Guyana’s independence in 1966.
“If you haven’t distributed the wealth in six decades, it’s hard to see it happening now,” he said.