About Mahalia

My story

I was born in Mabaruma, Region One, the North West of Guyana. My parents were business pioneers in Kumaka, but when I was just one year old, their home and business were destroyed by arson. A kind young man who knew our family saw the fire from Hosororo Hill where he lived, ran all the way down and got there just in time to rescue me and my brother from the bedroom while my mother screamed for her children. My father moved our family deep into the Interior, near the Venezuelan border, to a place called Yarakita, where he built one of the largest peanut farms in Guyana.

My early childhood was spent amongst the Indigenous people of the North West. They taught me to fish, to hunt, to paddle a canoe, to make fire, and to cook outdoors on the fireside. They showed me what we call bush medicine, the practice of using plants, roots, leaves and barks as natural remedies for everyday ailments. I cannot remember ever needing a hospital as a child. My mother and the land provided everything. We grew yams, cassava, eddoes, sweet potatoes, plantain, bananas, pineapples, guava, cashews, oranges, limes, avocados, soursop. If it could grow in that rich Guyanese soil, we grew it.

My Arawak grandmother taught me to make cassava bread and toma pot. My African grandmother taught me how to cook healing ground provisions, cow heel soup, and sweet potato pie. Between them, they gave me the understanding that food is medicine, that cooking is an act of love, and that ancestral wisdom is a gift worth carrying across every ocean.

When my parents rebuilt in Kumaka, I returned for school, spending every holiday back on the farm in Yarakita. It was in Kumaka that the family restaurant and cake shop came to life, and that is where I truly learned to cook and bake alongside Mum. At fifteen, I moved to Georgetown to complete the final two years of my secondary school, which I had started in Mabaruma. And somewhere in that little girl's heart, a dream was forming: one day, I want my own restaurant.

Forty-five years later, in 2019, Mahalia's Kitchen opened in the UK. The childhood dream became real, not in Guyana, but carrying every piece of Guyana within it. My lifelong fascination with herbs, natural remedies, and food as healing led me to become a Certified Health Coach and Holistic Menopause Coach. My own perimenopause journey, and the silence I saw in so many Caribbean and Guyanese women around me, led me to write Riding the Waves.

My heritage is rich and layered. I carry Arawak roots from my grandmother, African ancestry, and East Indian heritage from my father's side. My paternal grandparents came from India, and that lineage runs deep through our family's food, our spices, and the way we gather around a table. I am Guyanese and Caribbean and proud of every thread that weaves together to make me who I am. I am a caterer, a coach, an author, and a mother of two teenagers I am raising to own their dreams. And everything I do is rooted in the same truth I learned as a child in Yarakita: the earth provides, if you know how to listen.

"I honour my body for carrying me through a decade of stress. And now I feel so free as I continue my healing journey."