NUN SO BRAVE

by Zorina Shah

The following pieces were strung together for the 80th birthday of Sr. Rosario Hackshaw on August 9, 2017

Sister Rosario and Sister Juliet Rajah
of the Holy Faith Congregation earlier this year

NUN SO BRAVE: Memories of Matelot 1

Many years ago, more than two decades I believe, I journeyed to Matelot one Sunday evening for the commissioning of the alternative energy “something”. Not a plant, but something nonetheless, so let us say system. Ah yes, how could I forget, it was indeed more than two decades because Senator Barry Barnes, an uncle of the footballer John Barnes, was Minister of Energy, meaning Minister of Oil and Gas and Amoco and Trintoc and TTEC.

The village had its own primary school which didn’t need electricity. The nights without moonlight were black, the village perched as it is between the Caribbean Sea and the Northern Range. But the people sitting on the kerbs didn’t need light. If you heard some shocking statement, you never knew whose mouth it had come from.

The only real need for electricity came around election time. The trucks would brave the north coast roads, forgive me for making the road seem like something more than patches of asphalt and stone scattered here and there. They would come up on the Sunday and make sure there was light enough to last until the votes were counted on Monday night.

The high school went up across the river. However the material got past the rickety wooden bridge is anyone’s guess. I only know because I asked. The brown wooden building, one could easily say sprawling, sat on a hill, its place natural against the vegetation, plants hanging from the ceiling.

Now that building needed some lights. Children needed to do some home economics, yes that was a subject too, and the boys would have to saw wood for the boat building. Power tools would help. The labs required a flame now and then. The supervisors for examinations wanted some light.

Rosario could have had the money to take electricity across the river. That would be plenty money for some electricity maybe four days a year. When she opted for solar and wind, the money became scarce.

Not short of skills in selling her ideas, she approached Catholic funding agencies and her own congregation of the Holy Faith. I mean she had already talked Fatima College and her sisters into finding money to help fund the construction of the school.

The guys came from the Isle of Man and Professor Oliver Headley came from the Cave Hill Campus in Barbados. The windmills stood tall on the beach below St. Ann’s Bay and the solar panels lined the roof of the school. In a little shed along the trail to the school, the wind and sun was converted into energy and stored in marine batteries, six of them… and there was light!

(Caribbean Beat photo)

NUN SO BRAVE - Memories of Matelot II

The white van hurtling along the North Coast Road became a familiar sight over the years. Pedestrians knew to get out of the way when they saw the van, mainly because of the condition of the roads though it was easier for them to say it was because of the lady driver. The van represented different things to different people, but to the children of Matelot, it stood between them and having a teacher in a classroom.

Rosario scouted the Catholic high schools in and around Port of Spain and along the East West corridor for teachers for the new Matelot Community College. She was able to capture some of the best who had themselves recently completed their A’Level exams. Among them were scholarship winners, those who would go on to be outstanding professionals and members of the clergy, even those who continued and became good teachers.

Catholic parents volunteered their children, never mind that those children would have been comfortable working down the road from their homes or even starting university right away.

The challenge was getting to Matelot. There was no commuting, very little transport, two hours away from the nearest town of Sangre Grande and worst of all, the roads: falling away all through the villages of Oropouche, Matura, Rampanalgas, Cumana, Toco, Sans Souci, Monte Video, Grande Riviere and St. Helena. Falling away yes, sometimes into the sea, like where the healthy surf came past the shore and merged with the village of Sans Souci.

The next step was to source accommodation in the village. Few parents knew where their children were going to teach, but they trusted Sister to look after them. Teachers met at Holy Trinity R.C. Church in Arouca to leave for Matelot at 7 p.m. on Sunday nights. They worked an hour extra Monday to Thursday so they could leave at midday on Friday. That way Rosario could get to the Ministry of Education before the office closed for the week.

I cannot tell every story of the bus which broke down so often in the night, of teachers reaching Matelot close to midnight or of how one night they drove back looking for bags that had fallen out. Rosario drove the bus herself along those makeshift roads, doing so anytime and every time the needs of the school and the community and the parishioners demanded it. Later on she got some help from Marcelline Peters who came from Point Fortin to teach in the primary school. 
(Trinidad Guardian photo 2005)

NUN SO BRAVE: Memories of Matelot III 

The road came to life at the hub, right there by the primary school, the church, the little shop and the bar. Then, one could have travelled westward from Toco, along the Paria Main Road on the coast for miles to see only the odd vehicle, a few pedestrians and animals. At the place where it came to life, so did it paradoxically come to an end. On the map, the road extended all the way along the North Coast to Blanchisseuse and La Fillette, past the points of Tacarib and the Madamas River. That is the old map. That is the map the Ministry of Education officials looked at to turn down the request for a high school for children from Matelot. Instead of trying to go east to Toco, they said, the students could continue west to Blanchisseuse or even Arima.

Rosario must have heard a fair share of nonsense those days, yes. When she arrived in Matelot in the early 1980s, there was an old wooden school building, but no teachers and therefore no students. The students came back, they wrote 11+ but dared not leave the village for the Toco Composite School 25 kilometres away. If they ventured out, how or when they got home would be a different matter.

The high school came, not as easily as that sounds, so did children from other villages, from Toco and Cumana. There was the boy who asked for a place after the class was filled. He offered to bring his own desk and chair. How could Rosario turn him down?

There at the place where the Paria Main Road fell away, students from other villages joined their colleagues from Matelot and their teachers and gladly made their way along the track on the coastline, across the bridge over the Matelot River and up to the classrooms on the hill.

Slowly things changed, a new primary school, small improvements in the road, entrepreneurs emerged, a few jobs were created and then students began getting full CXC certificates. In the village the fishermen were encouraged by the signs, a truck visited the gas pump and there was cold storage that worked as the electricity permitted. The children sang, they played pan and they had their own Carnival at the hub and an annual sports day on the field below the high school.

A lot of the older people I knew, they have gone, God rest their souls. Many of the younger ones are parents. Those younger ones, some of them teach in the schools, they work in urban areas and they come back home. The church is being rebuilt, but when Tropical Storm Bret brought its wind and dropped some rain a few weeks ago, the story of the road…. it was the same.

Note: Tropical Storm Bret passed around June 19, 2017

NUN SO BRAVE: Memories of Matelot IV

We were taking a rest today, but return by special request from Elana Nathaniel. Here it is, as far as I had reached.

I can tell you the story of how Rosario found the farmer lying on the roadside, bleeding. His leg, along the shin, was gashed by his own cutlass. She took him to the health centre in Toco and was co-opted into working by instructions in an emergency. 

Or I can tell you of how, at the home of the Glauds in the village of St. Helena, we arrived to find the goat dying while trying to give birth. The old people were just sitting there, sad that they would lose the animal. She stooped beside the mother, used her bare hands to move around the kid, got him out, washed her bloody hands and drove away. But not before she had chastised them. “So long you minding goat and you don’t know about breech?”

I will tell you of one of her favourite villagers (and mine too) about to deliver her seventh or eighth baby. She was brought to Sister when her water bag burst to get a ride down to the hospital in Sangre Grande, 73 kilometres away. There was no electricity that late evening but there were two young men from Puerto Rico who had come to Trinidad to study at the Seminary of St. John Vianney and the Uganda Martyrs up on Mt. St. Benedict. They were in Matelot helping as teachers at the high school. This day Rosario found a new role for them.

She decided that they would not make it to the hospital. Ramon’s role was to find light, enough light, because the candles were inadequate. He made a flambeau. Jonas stripped cloth, heated water and served as the helper while Ramon held up the light and Rosario and the village midwife delivered the baby, a girl.

I wasn’t there for that delivery but when I heard the story I said, “Poor Ramon”. 

“Poor Ramon?” she asked. “You mean poor N…, with Ramon hovering over her with a light."

AFTER MATELOT

I sat with Ismay on the porch at Ana Street, Woodbrook that day in 1998 while Mary and Elsa took Rosario to the airport. Rosario was leaving for Perth, a sort of sabbatical after those years in Matelot, but really preparation for another round of hard work. I conjured up extreme images of her drawing water from a well and hewing wood.

Hina Shah with widows at a meeting in Gujarat. ICECD photo

Holy Faith Sisters arrive in Riwoto, January 2013. St. Patrick's Missionary photo

“I won’t see my daughter again,” Ismay said as her three girls drove towards Wrightson Road. What does one say to that? 

There was a phone in Perth. We didn’t have WhatsApp and Skype in those days and TSTT’s overseas rates were damaging, six dollars a minute plus VAT. When I called that first time, I waited 10 or more minutes for her to come to the phone. I called once more. Mary had already called. Rosario was coming home. Ismay hadn’t seen her daughter again.

From Australia, her next stops were Bangladesh and Ahmedabad in the Indian state of Gujarat. She had talked Grameen banking, micro finance and empowering women through entrepreneurship for years with Fr. Michel de Verteuil. Chittagong was the place to learn the methods through which the most vulnerable were dragged from poverty. Although I knew of Muhammad Yunus and his work among Bangladesh’s poorest, Rosario’s enthusiasm gave it new meaning.

I don’t remember calling Ahmedabad, but there was better email. From there, Rosario was going to Shimla in the Himalayas. When I needed to contact her I got her number from Hina Shah.

I called the convent in the Himalayas and heard my voice echo four times when I asked for her. I had to tell her that Archbishop Anthony Pantin had died. They had grown up in Woodbrook, he a little older. Their families were friends. His brother Clive had been a great help to Matelot when he was Minister of Education. Rosario was already sitting on the bus to New Delhi and came back to take the call. “Yes, yes, this call is from China, you have to talk,” I could hear the voice coaxing her.

Back home she launched into HOPE, Helping Ourselves Prosper Economically. She trained her crew for the field and toured the coast from Mayaro to Matelot, going inland to Plum Mitan, Sangre Grande, Valencia, La Horquetta, Couva and other villages. HOPE created a new class of small entrepreneur, changing many lives and bringing dignity to many women. 

South Sudan must have been difficult. I went to Valencia to help her prepare for that trip. How best to communicate, that was the big question. She and two other Holy Faith sisters from Ireland would be teaching the children of the Toposa in Riwoto, a project arranged through the Kiltegan Fathers. If she got an internet connection, we could use email. That worked a few times. She wrote when she picked up wifi from an NGO. No call ever went to the phone number we were given. I called USAID once and they knew the sisters, they promised to deliver a message.

Rosario is back home again. Hers has been a long journey since the day she first left Ismay in 1958 for Irish shores, to become a member of the Holy Faith Congregation, to make lifelong friends among the Irish, among the people of St. Brigid’s, Siparia, Matelot and wherever else she has been.

For being brave, putting the needs of children first and standing up for the poor she has been recognised twice in national awards at Trinidad and Tobago's Independence and in several other places.

Maybe someday if I take the advice of her friends Trudy and Cheron Herrera and Anise Maybodi, we will write her story. I know it won’t come from her. That is because I am familiar with the story of her aunt Sr. Dominic Marie Turner, a Mary Knoll sister who lived in Hong Kong in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. They do what they have to do.

Mavis Lee Wah- teacher, actor, activist, leader

by Zorina Shah

I didn’t go to Naparima Girls’ High School, you can probably tell by the way I still speak with my Lochmaben village accent. In high school, I had no interest in drama although I did appear in an opera. It may have been Alladin. 

I never met Mavis Lee Wah until I started working in newspapers in the early seventies when I saw her in a number of plays.  Her role as Lady Macbeth (1974) could be my favourite. She and her husband James were among the first people to help me find my feet in a strange town. I had thought the town folks were clannish but the Lee Wahs helped me change that view. 

I grew close to the San Fernando Arts Council. The Naparima Bowl was alive with song and dance and drama and the queen shows and numerous festivals. I must have seen every dance troupe before the auditorium was destroyed by fire. They included Eugene Joseph’s Dance Theatre, Joyce Kirton, Torrance Mohammed’s Arawaks and Eric Butler with whom I also taught. I saw numerous plays and while I liked the staging of Thomas Hardy’s ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ I walked out on a Drama Guild production of a Shakespeare play at Presentation College auditorium.

It was in times like those in the 70s that I saw Derek Walcott’s “O Babylon” and the visiting Senegalese National Dance Company.

While I was a spectator to these events, I was a participant in the activities of the San Fernando Citizens Action Committee founded by James Lee Wah. At a Town Hall meeting organised by the Committee I, as one of the invited speakers, froze. The words just wouldn’t come out. Mavis was sitting in the front row, looked me in the eye and gave me the gesture to try again. It wasn’t the only time I had lost my voice. I was a member of the San Fernando Writers’ Association and we were reciting a poem at the San Fernando Arts Festival. Not a word came out of my mouth.

As members of the Citizens Action Committee, Mavis and I stood side by side holding placards in demand for a link road off the Lady Hailes Avenue and to stop the destruction of the San Fernando Hill. Motorists would drive past and ridicule us and she once asked me if I was not bothered by the comments. The link road is what is known as the Gulf City Link Road. One day after she finished school at Naparima Girls, we gathered on Pointe a Pierre Road for the walk up San Fernando Hill. It was there that we saw schoolchildren playing in a huge pond of muddied water. 

Mungal Chattergoon had returned from England and he too was a member of the San Fernando Citizens Action Committee. He took the pictures which we used in the Express the following day, a Thursday.

The Borough’s Statutory meeting was that same Thursday. Mayor Gertrude Kirton placed the San Fernando Hill at the top of the order of business. She called me by name and referred to the article. Then she ordered that all cutting on the hill be stopped. She called out the City Engineer Vasco Loreilhe and Superintendent of Police Fitzroy Fahey and asked them to arrange the documentation to cease destruction of the hill.

I saw less of James and Mavis after they left San Fernando for Gran Couva. About four years ago I received a lengthy hand written letter from them.

I checked on line today for a picture of Mavis and found just these two. I am sure we could find many among Mungal’s files, the teacher, the actress, the activist. 

Yesterday June 24, Mavis died. May her soul rest in peace.

Hate speech and me

In May 2016, I posted my first criticism of Facebook. Although I have an account, I have done nothing to build it with hundreds of contacts. My 160 friends are mainly those whose requests I have accepted. I have ignored countless others. I have stood face to face with at least 140 of my friends. The few others, I share something in common with them like sport or the environment or I just like them. It is difficult to share political views across the board.

My post of May 2016 criticised Facebook for its funding of the Republican National Convention and said I would leave the site. I gave in to the requests and stayed.

There have been many incidents where I have been prevented from commenting on my own posts. The first time I was actually blocked from posting was my use of a story in the Newsday written by Azard Ali. I tried in every way to determine how my post was considered “spam”, but Facebook never reinstated the post. Events of the last year have led me to believe that it was simply a matter of Zorina Shah speaking to Azard Ali. You can judge for yourselves.

I know that whenever I google something, an ad related to it shows up in facebook. I am aware that Facebook tracks posts closely so they would know that I have said that Mohammad bin Salman is the true leader of the free world and Netanyahu and Trump and those others lining up to take his money are his lackeys. I have said that Muslims around the world are so dependent on the handouts to fund their mosque activities, they will not criticise the Saudi bombing of Yemen with western support.

I have never said anything about how Facebook was used to create the “Arab Spring” (IN SOME COUNTRIES) that has left the Middle East in greater chaos. I am sure the Arab Spring helped to make Hillary Clinton “the most qualified candidate” ever for the US Presidency. That was a good joke Prez Obama made. But I have mentioned how Facebook hate speech contributed to the Rohingya Muslim crisis in Myanmar. I no longer watch American propaganda television for more than two minutes a day so I cannot say if Mark Zuckerberg was asked about that topic in his visit to a congressional committee. I made that decision on watching cable news when I saw that Anderson Cooper (who had cried for Haiti after Trump made cruel derogatory remarks) refuse to even question the Saudi ambassador on the killing of Yemeni children. They are selective on who they cry for, especially if bin Salman was to spread around his money in the US a few days later. I know that they are prepping for war against Iran and they all want that war, none more than the networks. The US likes to gives names to its wars "Desert Storm", "Operation Anaconda". They could call this one "Bigger than Stormy Daniels".

On May 1, two days ago, I posted a few words I had used before: “The lovely month of May”. Within minutes Facebook was inviting my friends to say if my post was hate speech. I couldn’t comment on the post so I took a screenshot and created a new post. My friend Niala Maharaj and I had a lengthy conversation on the new post, though it was hardly related to hate speech. Facebook removed the hate speech question after three hours. This was a Facebook question about me and what I had posted.

Post from 2012

Post from May 1, 2018

Yesterday, May 2, Niala Maharaj shared a tweet from Dr. Jill Stein on Iran. In the post she asked one of her friends if they had anything to say. I tried on three occasions to comment, simply “I have something to say” and was blocked on each occasion. She made a subsequent post after I told her about the censorship and I could not comment on that one either. The post mentioned that I had worked voluntarily with the Catholic Church and I wanted her to remove that. I do not believe that any connection with the Catholic church should give me the right to post freely on Facebook. Her friends who said it was “fake news” were allowed to post.

Jill Stein's original post. The red heart means that I had liked the tweet.

The truth is that Facebook is a dump where I understand that people post horrible things. I do not see those things because I do not have friends who post gruesome videos.

I am forced to conclude, as Niala has done, that I am targeted 1) for my obviously Muslim name and 2) my politics, where I do not support WAR. It is clear that my ideological position is different from that of Facebook and when all is said and done, this is their platform. They own it.