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.