BB-2-w • Meeting with Phyllis and Adrian Thompson, 6/5/78

BB-2-w

Sharon Amos

Phyllis and Adrian Thompson visit to them 6/5/78

Debbie T [Touchette], Debbie B [Blakey], Terri J [Carter Jones], Sharon

-we were told to go visit them because she had visited Jonestown/ her husband and she own a citrus and orinique farm and he used to work with Dr [Ptolemy] Reid/ we were to find out his relationship to Dr. Reid and see if they could give any starters to us (for our orphans and all our population we take care of)

-the first two times I called her she seemed friendly but said she’d call me back

-she did call back and arranged for us to come over

-she was exquisitively dressed / very nicely and her home was beautifully decorated, very subtle taste of a kind you rarely find in Guyana, with nice artistic touches/ she and her husband do landscaping for banks and various businesses in town and have quite a lot of plans in their backyards

-I saw a book on a table (something about inner philosophy – Unity type thing and asked her about it/ this please her as she is quite involved in Unity tho she is a Presbyterian, she really relates to “inner spirit” and pioneering in that inner growth way (I find in PR if you can find an area that people really relate to they are more likely to be interested in things you later want to say)

-anyway, her husband and she both are Guyanese but he speaks almost as if he is English and I guess he is Portuguese/ he was the Permanent Sect of Forest, Eines, and lands and tho he didn’t work under Reid directly in this Ministry, he said he worked quite closely with him in projects but he claimed Reid was nevee Minister of Agriculture which maybe I had the mistaken understanding he was

-he is a virtual encyclopedia of citrus and information about good things to grow/ he is knowledgeable about which types of citrus to grow so there is no time of the year that you are without citrus (Debbie took notes on this and took down the names of a couple of books, also he gave us a name of a citrus specialist near us who could come and look at our citrus)

-maybe someone like Jan Wilsey when she is in town could talk to him too if she knows enough about citrus totell him what is wrong/ he wanted to know if the blossoms were falling off or what was wrong with our citrus

-he talked about cherries and vitimon C/ the more acide a cherry is, the more vitimon C it has/ the sweeter, the less vitimon C (2 cherries a day furnishes all the vitimon C you need)

-he showed us a type of lime that is much jucier and gorws well (debbie has the name) – they are getting Guyana interested in it

-this has always been his interest to have a citrus farm, but he grows his trees in sand, white sand, because he hates to work in mud/ she said that for them it was very expensive to have the farm as they have to pay help and tho they’ve had it 10 years some of the trees still aren’t producing too much (the ones like Sapadillo and the ones that take longer altho they are selling produce from citrus and some of their tree

-she wasvery interested in Jonestown and so was her friend who came with her who has returned to England

-Adrian (her husband) says that Reid always refers to him as “young man” altho Adrian looks to be about 55-60 years old

-he is still very involved in political things/ arranged some kind of tour for some visit people (don’t recall exactly what the business was) but he is busy/ they are almost too busy, she said

-I thought maybe the Moores could meet them as the Moores would be impressed by them