26.7 C
Belize City
Thursday, March 28, 2024

World Down Syndrome Day

Photo: Students and staff of Stella Maris...

BPD awards 3 officers with Women Police of the Year

Photo: (l-r) Myrna Pena, Carmella Cacho, and...

Suicide on the rise!

Photo: Iveth Quintanilla, Mental Health Coordinator by Charles...

FROM THE PUBLISHER

PublisherFROM THE PUBLISHER


I wanted to write, and I figured it was about time I found out what the dickens I was really going to write about. As a simultaneous concern, I wanted to commit myself to the struggles of my people for freedom and powerful things like that. The key to what happened in my post-Dartmouth life was the fact that I was in a profession that allowed for the kind of revolutionary craziness which followed.


There were maybe 25 or 30 university graduates in British Honduras in those days, and everybody behaved a certain proper, staid way in public. A degree in those days was a guarantee of a comfortable life in B.H., and the mere first degree was considered a sacred accomplishment. I?d worked very hard to achieve scholastic honours, but the fact that I was in this unconventional profession, meant that I did not see myself in a strait-jacketed way.


University can be really rough. When I think of guys like my classmate, Neil Garbutt, and my younger brother, Ronald, who left secondary school liberal arts backgrounds to do medicine in American universities, I give maximum respect. I did one pre-med course, biology, at Dartmouth, and the experience was so scary it was almost traumatic. Look, I?d never been in a biology lab before. All the Dartmouth kids in bio had already been through all of that in high school or prep school. When the lab instructor gave me a rat to dissect, this was like outer space for me. But the American students were cool like that. They?d been there before. It may have been experiences like bio lab that influenced me into sticking to my books. If I had to go back to university again, what I?d do differently is I would get involved more in the extracurricular life of the university. You must understand, however, that there was a great deal of pressure on me at Dartmouth. I had to succeed at all costs, or my family would have been disgraced.


I remember that my friends in Brooklyn, with whom I partied the night before I came home in 1968, really didn?t want me to leave. This was the usual. I don?t know about other cities, but in New York they never wanted you to go back home to Belize.


Anyway, I made it back home, and so there I was back on West Canal Street in the summer of 1968. The first pressure that came, came from Premier George Price. In those days, everybody who graduated from university had to visit the Premier, and then there would be a big story about the visit on the government monopoly radio station ? Radio Belize. Almost all those graduates were government scholars. I was not. I?d gone to Dartmouth on a United States State Department scholarship. I felt no obligation to George Price?s government.


I was an NIP, and I knew George Price knew I was an NIP. I wasn?t going to ?kin no teeth with him like some bogus bourgeoisie. So I refused to go to the Premier?s office. After a while, the pressure came on my dad, who was the Postmaster General, which is to say, an employee in Mr. Price?s government. After three weeks, the pressure got so big on my dad, I said, well, I gotta go.


So I went. When they ushered me in, Mr. Price said, ?How are you, Grevel?? I said to myself, oh, oh, my man is trying to prove something here. He be trying to put me down. Mr. Price knew what my real name was, so he was deliberately letting me know how unimportant I was to him. That?s the way I saw it. Thirty-six years later, I really can?t remember if I pointed out to Belize?s most powerful man what my real name was.


It didn?t make any difference. With me, if you don?t know what my real name is, you gon? find out. It?s just a matter of time.


All power to the people.

Check out our other content

World Down Syndrome Day

Suicide on the rise!

Check out other tags:

International