Geologist Violet Smith pioneers family-run consultancy in Guyana

Violet Smith grew up in the Cuyuni–Mazaruni region of Guyana, eventually settling in Bartica, a small commercial centre about 80 km inland from the Atlantic Ocean.

The town — at the confluence of the Cuyuni, Mazaruni and Essequibo rivers — was considered the gateway to the gold mines and diamond fields of the interior.

As a young girl she would watch the steamers come in and trucks, loaded with camp supplies, disappear into the swampy lowlands on their way into the country’s dense rain forest.

Just about every household in town had at least one prospector in the family who would leave for months and sometimes years at a time to hunt for minerals.

Locals called them “pork knockers” — after their diet of pickled pork from the wild pigs that sustained them while away from home.

Though her father was a prison officer, one of the family’s closest friends, Cyrilda DeJesus, who Smith affectionately calls Aunty Cyrilda, was one of the first women to go into the bush alongside the men.

“She was a great mentor for me — one of the first women in the mining sector in Guyana,” Smith recalls in an interview in Toronto earlier this year. “She eventually went into parliament.”

But when Smith decided to study geology after high school, just about everyone she knew tried to dissuade her.

“They would say, ‘Why don’t you do something else that is more feminine?’” she says.

“You have to realize though, as much as Guyana has a mining history that goes back for centuries, women who went into the business in those days were considered ‘bush women’ — women of loose character — or ‘working women’ in the flesh.”

Undeterred, Smith chose to study geology in Canada — first at a technical college in Sudbury, then at Carleton University in Ottawa, and later at Laurentian University in Sudbury.

After graduation and working for a time at the Ontario Geological Survey and at Ontario Hydro, Smith felt the pull of home. In her mid-thirties she returned to Guyana and eventually set up her own consulting firm, AVA Management and Consultancy Services, and served as country manager for several companies in the extractive sector.

One of her most significant contracts was for Toronto mining entrepreneur Patrick Sheridan.

Smith had met Sheridan and his wife Marjorie at the annual Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada convention while living in Canada, and the trio, along with Sheridan’s son Patrick Sheridan Jr., had become good friends.

Over the years, Smith pitched Guyanese ideas to Sheridan Sr., but he had become disillusioned with the country in 1974, when the government nationalized Reynolds Guyana Mines, a subsidiary of Canada’s Reynolds Metals.

By the time Smith moved back to Guyana full-time, however, the political situation had improved enough for Sheridan Sr. and Sheridan Jr. to contemplate exploration in the country, with Smith’s help.

The Sheridan-backed company went by many names, Smith says, but at the height of its success was known as Guyana Goldfields (TSX: GUY). The company discovered the Rory’s Knoll deposit and eventually put the Aurora gold mine into commercial production in January 2016.

“It wasn’t Guyana Goldfields back then,” Smith says of her early days working for the Sheridans. “Guyana Goldfields evolved later.”

The team was hunting for minerals near the Cuyuni River, 194 km upriver from Bartica, in an area known for its placer mining as well as two past-producing underground mines, Aleck Hill and Mad Kiss, which had operated in the 1940s.

But exploration dollars were tight.

“We started off rinky-dink, trying to make ends meet to drill,” Smith remembers. “In those days there was no money. None at all. We were shoestringing it. The most critical thing at that time was having the men stay in the bush without pay … things were bad in the early days.”

One drill season, just before Christmas, however, when the rigs were about to be returned to camp, geologist Rory Calhoun saw something interesting, Smith says.

“We figured we would drill it, but our head office in Toronto said not to drill it because there were other proven areas. But we drilled it anyway.

“It was an act of disobedience,” she chuckles. “I had to give the permission to drill because I was head of country. I said, ‘Let’s do it and I’ll cover you, based on the geology.”

The team then dispersed on vacation, and by the time everyone returned to work in January, the results were in, and Rory’s Knoll was a discovery.

“Once we found it, the money started coming in based on the drill holes,” Smith says.

Over the course of her career, Smith’s consulting firm has worked for many companies both in the mining and oil and gas sectors.

Smith likes to say she built her reputation on honesty, hard work and thriftiness.

“I have a reputation for being able to manage companies very frugally,” she laughs. “It has actually become a joke. They call me the ‘African axe.’”

These days Smith is starting to transition management of the business to her two daughters, Ayaana and Aisha, who have helped her build the company since they were young students in elementary and high school.

The girls would help their mother before they went to school in the mornings, as well as in the evenings and on weekends.

“I had to get up very early — around 4 a.m. — to get to the market because I had to service my camps,” Smith says. “And when I got home at 6 a.m. the girls were up and we had to parse the supplies between the different camps. We had to get bags and labels and when they went to school at 8 a.m. I would load it all into the truck and drive it to Parika.

“There were just the three of us, we had no staff, so they have been involved from the very beginning, they have been integral. And when they got home from school they had to take phone calls, take notes because I was gone. Unpaid labour!” she grins.

When the girls went off to university in Canada and the U.K., they would help on their vacations home.

Smith’s eldest daughter, Ayaana, studied social sciences majoring in the areas of psychology, anthropology and environmental science. She now advises AVA Management’s clients on working with local communities and sustainability issues.

The youngest daughter, Aisha, contemplated a career in nuclear physics before specializing in economic geology.

“I’m very proud of them, it’s a blessing,” Smith says of her daughters.

The feeling is mutual.

“We’re proud of her, too!” Ayaana says. “There weren’t a lot of people of colour in Sudbury when she started out. People would say to me, ‘Oh, your mom must be that geologist. They still know of her as that Caribbean geologist from Guyana. They found it so fascinating.”

The threesome work hard to encourage more women to join the industry — particularly in Guyana.

“As much as we’re in 2019 — it’s still taking a lot of time to condition people to accept women in the mining industry here,” Ayaana says. “No women were even allowed to come on-site at one of the first mines I worked at in Guyana. It was a Canadian company. But little by little they came, and now we have women in various technical fields. People are getting more used to it.”

It’s not just that the camps are dominated by males, Smith adds, it’s the tough working conditions in remote parts of the rainforest. “It’s a very harsh life and you’re exposed to malaria and other things like tigers and snakes. I think because of that, the lack of infrastructure, it prevented women from entering the industry … it’s a very hostile terrain to operate in.”

Smith says both she and Aisha have contracted malaria, and when she first started going into the bush, “you never knew if you’re coming back out — if you’re going to make it. If you get malaria, there are no planes that can come in, there are no airstrips.”

She recalls one trip early in her career when she was returning to one of her project sites that had been staked weeks before. In their absence, heavy rainfall in neighbouring Venezuela had seeped into the Cuyuni River, flooding its banks and swamping the camp.

“When we arrived it was underwater and we got there at six in the afternoon. We had to sleep in the boat.”

Exploration certainly presents greater challenges than in places like Ontario, she adds. “If you go into the bush in Canada for three or six months, they have choppers and slings, and they drop your food and stuff. In Guyana you don’t have that. There are helicopter services, but you can’t rely on them. So you have to find a way. You have to know how to build bridges across creeks and rivers, you have to do all of that. You have to put in all the infrastructure.

“In most of the places you can’t stick in machinery,” she continues. “You have to clear the bush and then you have to carry in a generator over these long distances. It’s doable, but it’s very, very hard, and it’s tedious, so you need that local help.”

Then of course there are the evacuation operations necessary when something goes wrong — like an encounter with a snake. Guyana is home to “the worse possible kinds” of snakes, Smith says, like the labaria, a rainforest species that lives near waterways and whose venom causes massive tissue destruction and internal bleeding.

Big cats also present dangers — one of the reasons there are often dogs in camp. “We built a camp at Tapir and the boys thought they had a big cat around,” Smith says. “One night the dog was just howling, he sensed it. The dog went under the hammock where the men were sleeping outside under a tarp, but the cat just went in and dragged him out. The man was awake in his hammock — he was just happy it got the dog and not him.”

The girls have their share of stories, too. Ayaana recalls assisting an oil exploration company and travelling by boat. “They said ‘watch your hands, there are stingrays and piranhas in the water. They also had caiman — big alligators — and they’re everywhere. You see them on the sandbanks, just panting as you drive by. I took off my life jacket because I thought, why should I bother? If I fall in the water I’ll be with stingrays, piranhas and caiman.”

She also remembers she didn’t bathe for days. “The Amerindians in the area told me to bathe with them in the river and I’m like, ‘No, I’m OK.’ I didn’t take a bath the whole time I was there. I was ripe. But the caiman are there watching you. The women told me if you bathe in a group the caiman don’t bother you. But I just wasn’t taking the chance!”

For all its challenges, Smith and her daughters wouldn’t have it any other way.

Guyana contains one of the most highly prospective yet under-explored mineral regions in the world, and they love what they do.

“There are immense struggles and you have to have a tenacity and a real belief that that’s what you want,” Smith says. “It doesn’t really matter where you are, or what stage you’re at in your education, or in your career. There are always going to be obstacles and people trying to dissuade you. So you have to stay the course.