(Kaieteur News) – Long before they were professors, they were just two Guyanese children watching their fathers leave for work every morning and come back looking more broken every evening.

This was the Guyana of the 1970s to 1990s. The cane fields were a hard and dangerous place. The air was thick with smoke from burning fields. Workers handled chemicals that got into the body and never really left. They worked around heavy machines with little protection. They had no choice but to show up and take the risk. And many of them paid a price that only became clear much later.

Dr. Rita Persaud saw that price up close. Her father gave his working life to the sugar industry. She was still a young girl when he died, a man used up by an industry that never looked back. Dr. Tejroi Naipaul grew up in that same world. His father spent years in the industry too, and Tejroi watched what the job slowly took from him.