Doreen de Caires - A brief profile
Stabroek News
July 16, 2004
"You must be a little dictator...if the buck stops with you, you have to be a mini dictator," says Doreen de Caires, the woman behind Guyana Publications Inc.
"Mrs de Caires", as her staff calls her, also has a human touch, ready to jump to aid anyone with a personal problem. Outside of the newspaper she is a farmer, cultivating land on the Essequibo River with her main crops being bananas and plantains. A woman of adventure, she often pilots her own boat to the riverain farm.
But she was not always a managing director, a farmer or a social activist (she helped to found the Beacon Foundation and Women Against Violence Everywhere (WAVE).)
It was back in 1956 that she started working as a telephone operator and wholesale clerk at age 16 in Jaikaran's Drug Store. She was awaiting her CGE results and her 18th birthday to qualify to become a nurse at the Public Hospital, Georgetown. She actually became a nurse for a year but then went abroad. Upon her return she quit the profession when she contracted pneumonia.
De Caires was married in 1960 and began working at the Guyana Graphic as an advertising salesperson. She divorced and in 1965 married attorney, David de Caires and quit her job as chief advertising salesperson and stayed home working through the Guyana Graphic on special projects.
Five years later, she established a real estate agency and operated a commission agency for Oil of Olay. Later de Caires would also establish a clothing boutique called Threads. But after 16 robberies in six months she was forced to close. She also discontinued the commission agency for Oil of Olay.
De Caires moved on to help set up the first legal aid clinic in Guyana after which she managed 14 workshops for the Guyana Council of Churches. And in 1985 she co-founded the Beacon Foundation with close friend, Clairmont Lye. Beacon Foundation offers various services including a hospice, a home for street people and a feeding programme. She remained as the vice-president of Beacon.
However, her informal work life ended in the late 1980s, after then President Desmond Hoyte remarked to Trinidad publisher, Ken Gordon in an interview that he had no objection to an independent newspaper being established in Guyana. Her husband, David, who had in the sixties published the New World fortnightly, a magazine exploring current affairs, contacted Gordon to help establish the Stabroek News.
Doreen became the general dogsbody. She ensured the copy was put together and then caught a plane to Trinidad to have the newspaper printed. She did this once a week for nine months until the newspaper acquired its own press.
Today, with Stabroek News as a daily, she devotes most of her energy to management.
She is the mother of three boys and two girls and enjoys golf, bridge, fishing, handicraft and travelling.