“Why should I be afraid of the pestilence that crawleth by night?” Tony Rebel. Because I am the youngest in my family and the last to leave home, I spent my last four years in high school as an only child. That wasn’t exactly true, since we always had ‘boarders’, friends from high school who […]
“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” ~ Alice Walker. I was a bedside nurse in the 1980s, a time when the way the government reimbursed hospitals for patient stays was upended completely. Prior to this time, any patient whose insurance was paid for by the […]
“… everything on earth can be eliminated under the right conditions.” ~ Louise Erdrich. Some years ago I had an experience which proved invaluable in the classroom: I witnessed a man experiencing the sudden onset of a stroke. We were at a fundraising dance together, he had gone to buy us a drink each, and […]
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is in keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. Evelyn was the first person who befriended me when I was the new girl in school. I was more than new, I was different, a little girl in rural Jamaica, with an English accent […]
“In every community, there is work to be done. In every nation, there are wounds to heal. In every heart, there is the power to do it.” ~ Marianne Williamson. I first learned about hurricanes when I was almost eight years old and traveling to Jamaica on the S.S. Ascania with my family and a […]
“The secret of freedom lies in educating people, whereas the secret of tyranny is keeping them ignorant.” ~ Maximilien Robespierre. I have always been a lover of words. Except once when I heard a new word, spoken in a sentence, by a person I had very little respect for. She happened to be my boss. […]
“Hope is the thing with feathersThat perches in the soul,And sings the tune without the words,And never stops at all,” ~ Emily Dickinson. I always knew I would have children. Lots of them. I remember being quite young when I held a baby, she was about seven months old, and she promptly tried to bite […]
“The humblest citizen of all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error.” ~ William Jennings Bryan. When I was no more than twelve or thirteen, I came home one day from school for lunch, which was my usual habit. I was not expecting […]
“In order to succeed, people need a sense of self-efficacy, to struggle together with resilience to meet the inevitable obstacles and inequities of life.” ~ Albert Bandura. I was one of those annoying students who enjoyed exams. I looked forward (although still with a touch of anxiety) to show what I knew. Like an athlete […]
“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt. These past weeks have been an interesting walk down memory lane for me. Last week I was dipping into documents written by some of my elders and reading of life in Jamaica in the 1830’s through to the 1960’s, along with […]
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