Patricia Sheerattan-Bisnauth is the new executive secretary in the department of partnership of women and men. Born in 1961, she is married, with one child. She studied for the ministry at the United Theological Colleges of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica. As well as serving as a minister of the Guyana Presbyterian Church, she has also worked as a teacher of English, coordinator of the Red Thread women's collective, director of the Guyana Women's Leadership Institute, and fundraising and marketing manager for Help and Shelter. She has held several posts with the social impact amelioration programme (SIMAP), coordinating a community development programme and an Amerindian pilot programme and managing a food for work project within the UN multipurpose agriculture and community development programme. She is a vice-president of the Guyana Council of Churches and a board member of the Swedish-based Life and Peace Research Institute. Attentive readers of Update will remember her as the facilitator at the gender awareness and leadership training workshop held by the department in Jamaica in October 1999. She starts work in the Alliance in May.

The Guyana Presbyterian Church, with approximately 2,500 members, is one of three small WARC member churches in Guyana. It owes its origin to Canadian Presbyterian missionaries who, until the end of the second world war, worked almost exclusively among East Indians employed in the sugar plantations. In 1945, a presbytery was established and the church became autonomous as the Canadian Presbyterian Church in British Guyana. It adopted its current name in 1961.

Páraic Réamonn