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Alan Knight Training Centre

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  In St Mary’s Church, Yupukari light is beginning to emerge from behind Guyana’s Pakaraima mountains seen in Anne Twisleton’s picture. The Angelus rings at the Alan Knight Training Centre and the office begins taking us up into its eternal rhythm, fitting the new day into psalm and scripture and praise. Mattins is followed by mass, when the students and their wives are joined by the villagers, so there are usually 30 or so of us each morning. Priest and servers go to the altar and the Holy Sacrifice is offered. Everyone gathers around the altar to feed on the bread of life, the bread which will strengthen and nourish and inspire the life of the day. There are plenty of boys keen to serve, so two assist each day - wearing knee-length green scapulars over their shirts and shorts. After Mass the school bell rings and the compound is full of cheerful children, just like a school playground anywhere. On Mondays the school day begins with flag raising and everyone singing the National Anthe
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Derek Goodrich - Anchor Man

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When Fr Allan Buik and I first arrived in Guyana April 1986 we were placed in a Cottage beside the Deanery across a very busy road from the magnificent Cathedral. Thus began a friendship with Fr Derek Goodrich that was to last half my life. He used to say I was his only friend to attend his 70th, 80th and 90th birthday celebrations. More than that I was to hear his last confession and preach at his funeral. When I arrived in Guyana Derek was Dean of St George’s Cathedral where he demonstrated fine stewardship of allegedly the largest wooden building in the world. I had come with Allan to exercise stewardship of a humbler edifice - the Church, Library and mud houses of Yupukari that made up the Alan Knight Training Centre for Amerindian priests in the Rupununi. As we came and went from the interior to Georgetown Derek was our anchor man - confessor, spiritual director and mentor - along with that other great expatriate priest Canon John Dorman. Later on his return to the College of St B
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John Dorman English Saint

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  ‘It will afford a good idea of the proportion which imaginary danger from animals in Guiana bears to the real evils inflicted by these if we try to realise the possible thoughts of a nervous man when bathing in one of the rivers of that country. The nervous bather remembers that from the moment when he throws off his clothes, every part of his body not covered by water is exposed to the attack of mosquitoes, sandflies, and many other sharply stinging insects; but, on the other hand, that every part of his body covered by water may at any moment be bitten by perai, may receive a violent shock from an electric eel, or may be horribly lacerated by the poisoned spine of a sting-ray, or a limb may be snapped off by a passing cayman or alligator, or his whole body may be crushed, and thus prepared for swallowing by a huge water serpent; or, even if none of these pains come upon him, he may remember that the egg of a certain worm… may be deposited unnoticed on his flesh, there to develop an
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Guiana becomes Guyana

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  ‘Guyana lies on the north-east coast of the South American continent, between Venezuela on the west, Surinam on the east, with the Atlantic Ocean facing it on the north. It is as large as the combined areas of England, Scotland and Wales. It has pleasant climatic conditions for the greater part of the year. It is particularly so on the coastal area where it is sub-tropical. Columbus sailed along the Guyana coast in 1498, and later wrote about the great rivers of Guyana flowing down from an earthly paradise. Sir Walter Raleigh voyaged to the country in 1595. The task of shaping Guyana's history was shared among the Dutch, French and British. Both the Dutch and British made the greatest contribution, each holding the country for well over one hundred years, compared with the short two-year period of the French. As a consequence, the impact of the former had been the stronger. Between 1841 and 1931 some 433,643 immigrants arrived in Guyana on the basis of an indentureship system. Th
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Archbishop Alan Knight

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  Alan Knight was Bishop of Guyana from 1937 to 1979. ‘A robust Anglo-Catholic, he made the Church under his direction one of the great centres of traditional Catholic ritual and devotion in the Anglican Communion. A convinced Caribbeanist, he liked to say that the Anglican Province of the West Indies was a lesson to the West Indian States on how to create unity in diversity. There were times when his behaviour was almost Papal, and yet he saw himself as a dyed-in-wool democrat. He was never an easy man to categorise... but there were two areas in which he admitted no contradiction: his faith in God and his love of Guyana’ (Robert Moore). Those words are a summary of the man responsible in more than one sense for my own call to the Diocese of Guyana. This was linked to the Diocese being infected by his ‘robust Anglocatholicism’ with a momentum that was to reach after his passing into Guyana’s interior through his memorial, the Alan Knight Training Centre I came to serve in 1987. As an
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El Dorado

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  This golden sunset was captured travelling home to Yupukari on Guyana’s Rupununi river where Anne and I were married. I wear a wedding ring made with Guyana gold. Throughout my time in the Rupununi I came across miners drawn to Guyana’s interior by the lure of gold. The lost city of gold called El Dorado was associated with the parish I served which witnessed a flow of European treasure hunters from 1492 when Columbus came on the South American scene. Literally meaning ‘Golden Man’ El Dorado has also been associated with legendary kings of the Muisca people populating the northern Andes who were initiated by being covered in gold dust before leaping into Lake Guatavita. The gold lust impacts to this day the indigenous people of Guyana adversely caught up for centuries in the quest for gold and the conflicts associated with it.  This picture of Anne Twisleton in the Alan Knight Training Centre land rover recalls our service in Guyana 1987-1990 which was built on two centuries of missi
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Introduction

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The beauty and challenge of Guyana, formerly British Guiana, has drawn a succession of missionaries from the Church of England to South America. My latest book ‘Guyana Venture’ tells something of that history from the English end. An Englishman who has ‘eaten labba and drunk creek water’ and been made a Canon of St George’s Cathedral, I have a lifelong bond both with Guyana and the Anglocatholic faith of my fellow missionaries. ‘Guyana Venture’ is framed by my service to the Diocese of Guyana and my spiritual friendship with Canon John Dorman and Dean-emeritus Derek Goodrich. The book charts my personal adventure, including my marriage to Anne at Yupukari, whilst addressing two centuries of missionary enterprise. Closure of Guyana Diocesan Association (GDA) in 2022 was a milestone in this mission partnership of which my book is a celebration.  Guyana Diocesan Association and I go back over 40 years to the friendship I built with John Dorman. A fellow member of the Company of Mission Pr
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