In November, 2006, I was at what could be called the lowest point in my life. I had lost my husband of fifty years and two months, Randy Carey, unexpectedly. Those were dark times, times of bewilderment and despair, times when I was in the valley of the shadow of death.
Yet, it was during these difficult times that some wonderful things happened. So many people stretched out hands of kindness, showed concern and were caring and sympathetic. The KCOB were among these angels.
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By Ray Ford
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Chris Gayle |
A sk them who makes them laugh,” Chris Gayle answered when asked about his poker-faced demeanour which infuriates so many.
If the smile pacifies, then Gayle intimidates, and that’s the rub. A smile – especially on the face of a West Indies cricket captain – makes people feel comfortable.
But Gayle doesn’t afford that luxury. “I am a very moody person,” he acknowledged to Michelle McDonald in a March 2004 interview. He sees his responsibility as instilling a can-do mentality in fellow players and in leading them.
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By Barrington Salmon
When my wife accepted an overseas assignment to Ethiopia, I viewed it as a unique opportunity to live in a country that we had heard so much about but didn’t really know outside of media reports on war, rumours of war, drought and famine.
Ethiopia’s appeal came from the fact that this vast East African nation of 80 million has been steeped in myth and mystery, and has been very much a part of Jamaican consciousness since the 1930s because of our country’s ties to Rastafarians.
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Bata Shoes and All that
By Dr. Cedric Lazarus
As a little country boy growing up in a tiny village in St. Catherine I was fascinated and overjoyed when my mother returned from Kingston on the train with my Bata shoes.
This significant event usually happened at Christmas or in early September at the start of the school year. I was proud of my name brand Bata shoes and woe betide any boy, or girl for that matter, who dared step on my shoes at school.
All this came to mind a few days ago when I read in the Toronto Star that Thomas Bata had died at the age of 93. So who was Thomas Bata? The article stated that Thomas Bata was born in Prague in 1914 to a family of cobblers. Remember that word for shoemakers from your ‘First Aid in English’? Young Thomas apprenticed under his father and took over the family business in 1932. Seven years later he fled Nazi Europe for Canada where he established the Bata Shoe Company in Toronto. By the mid 1990s the Bata Shoe Company employed over 70,000 persons in 65 countries (including Jamaica) and was selling over 300 million pairs of shoes annually!
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Can we set sail together?
Everton Barrett
It’s that time of year again, the new school year opens and we are cautiously optimistic about the journey we are about to embark upon.
On one hand we are excited about the new crop of lucky youngsters who are about to spend the next five to seven years honing their lives with the KC experience. On the other hand we are filled with trepidation about the youngsters we are about to prepare for their final rite of passage into adulthood and responsible citizenship.
Have we done a good job, have we given them the best experience possible under the circumstances? The answer varies depending on the person we’ve conversed with. Some parents are satisfied, while others are displeased. Interestingly, the latter are the ones who so effectively give the institution its sometimes-deserved black eye.
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