Every crown starts somewhere small. For Little Rock, it started with a hotel — a small property at 67 Vryman's Erven that civil engineer Rockcliff Christie designed and built with his own two hands in the 1980s. He had already spent a decade on the roads of Berbice, first for the Ministry of Works and Hydraulics, before he turned his blueprints toward something his own family could keep.

The hotel came with a bar, and the bar came with guests who wanted more to do in the evenings. Christie started bringing in video cassettes to keep them entertained. The demand for television only grew from there — so in 1989, he built one himself. Little Rock Television Station, LRTVS, went on air from the very same premises, broadcasting on Channel 10. The transmitter that started small — fifteen watts — would eventually reach a thousand.

By 2005 the family had outgrown one house. Little Rock Suites opened on Main Street, New Amsterdam — a second hotel, bigger and more polished, with double rooms, executive suites, even a presidential suite, and a restaurant and conference space to match. Berbice had a hotel it was proud to send its visitors to.

Radio took longer. Rockcliff applied for a broadcast licence in the early 1990s, and again in 1997. It finally came through in 2011. On 29 March 2014, Rockcliff and his wife Pearl stood together and launched 88.5 Rock FM — the first radio station Berbice had ever had — with President Donald Ramotar himself in the room to mark the occasion. The president of the Berbice Chamber of Commerce and Development Association called the Christies "a transformational force" in the community that day. It was not a compliment handed out lightly.

Two years later, in 2016, the family expanded again — a new complex on 10th Street housing the Eclipse multi-purpose hall, a gift shop, and a law office. Telecommunications Minister Cathy Hughes cut the ribbon. By then, the businesses Rockcliff Christie had built with his own drafting hand employed roughly 65 people across Guyana.

He died at home at 67 Vryman's Erven on 18 November 2020, aged 89 — in the very house where the whole story began. His crown passed to his daughter, attorney and now chief executive Naomi Christie, who carries the family businesses forward while raising the next generation to know exactly where they come from.

And this week, something new: the public record caught up with what Berbice always knew. Rockcliff Christie's own Wikipedia page went live — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockcliff_Christie — the engineer, the broadcaster, the builder, written into history for good.

Ask Naomi Christie why she keeps building — reader apps, a math solver, a law library, a market for the diaspora — and she gives you the same answer every time: she is done trading her hours for her income, one client at a time. She is building things once, and letting them serve Guyana forever.

It is, in its own way, the same instinct her father had when he built a television station so his hotel guests would have something to watch, or a radio station so Berbice would finally have a voice on the dial. He built for the people around him. She's doing the same thing — just from a laptop instead of a drafting table, for a whole country instead of one hotel.

Out at the edge of Guyana, where the Takutu River marks the border with Brazil, sits Lethem — savannah, rodeo dust, and some of the last untouched country in South America. It is also where Rockcliff Christie once drew the blueprints for a hundred-room hotel, a dream he never got the chance to build in his own lifetime.

That blueprint hasn't gone anywhere. It's still in the family's hands, and it's still the plan. Little Rock Lethem is not open, not under construction, and has no date attached to it yet — but it is real, it is drawn, and it is the next chapter this family intends to write.

The engineer drew it. The family will build it.