Housewife and mother, Goomtie Singh, sits outside her North Road home in Chatham and looks at the peaceful landscape and thinks to herself, "The struggle was worth it." Singh, 39, a gentle mother of two, looks back at the days of the bitter battle to prevent a smelter plant from being built in her village. She's not sure how it happened but she ended up in the frontline, defying the police and being part of a human barricade to block a bulldozer from entering the proposed site of the smelter. At the risk of neglecting her home and family, she was part of an all night vigil at a campsite with other protestors, making sure the bulldozer did not enter the land. A Hindu, she spends much time in prayer, she said.
Singh, last week, recalled the struggle and spoke of her resolve to preserve Chatham's beauty and bring good development to the area. "It was crazy. I wouldn't like to go back there again. "I got involved in the very beginning of the struggle in 2005 when I realised that the proposed plant was really close to home. "I believed we would have had to be relocated and this would have meant a drastic change in our lives." The dairy in the area had already shut down, retrenching some 60 people. Villagers were convinced that it had to do with the smelter. Singh and other villagers, with the assistance of environmental activists like Dr Wayne Kublalsingh and Dr Peter Vine, formed the Chatham Environmental Protection Group.
"I was the secretary," Singh said. Soon, she was at the frontline of the battle. "I kind of surprised myself. I really and truly didn't want to end up on the frontline but I kept being pushed by people.
"Kublalsingh would say I have a lot of intelligence." In addition to being at the front of protest action, Singh was also responsible for sending out correspondence from the group. She recalled the time when they formed the human barricade. "Tractors and bulldozers came down and there was an enormous police presence. "They were armed with big guns and kept pushing us aside. People were arrested. I particularly remember a protester lying on the road in front the tractor holding a child in his arms.
"The tractor was so determined to enter and the man wouldn't move. The police eventually removed the man and the tractor entered the land," Singh recalled. There were many protests, many meetings, she said. "There was the time we kept vigil all night for one month. We took turns at the camp keeping an eye on the land. "It took a toll on my family life. My husband was unemployed at the time but didn't care to look for work, so caught up he was in the struggle. "We survived on our savings and made out. "The kids didn't get the attention they needed but when I look back it was all worth it," Singh said. "I don't think that anywhere in this world anybody ever stopped a gigantic company like Alcoa."
She said if the smelter was built in Chatham, the coastline would have been destroyed to make a port for the plant. "Maybe the fishing industry here would have been no more. A lot of wells in the area would have been polluted when rain containing smelter emissions filled them." Singh will be part of beautification drive in Chatham today and is part of a group that is seeking to revive the dairy in the area.
