NGO TO HELP DEVELOP POTENTIAL IN BEETHAM

A charitable organisation, the Multicultural Club, has joined in the needed battle to help develop the potential of the youths of Beetham Gardens. It has begun by presenting the All In One Child Development Centre, a pre-school at Beetham Gardens’ Phase Five, with a blackboard, four circular child centred tables, 24 chairs and a cupboard to allow for the pre-school to cater for an additional class. Nonetheless, because of the special situation at Beetham Gardens and other low income areas, it may not be enough for sponsors to stop at gift giving, as admirable as that certainly is, but for them to become personally involved in extra-curricular and other activities at the Centre.

All In One, a Servol centre, and a crucial project of the Rotary Club of Central Port-of- Spain, has won the sponsorship support of several persons, including the President of Trinidad and Tobago, His Excellency Professor George Maxwell Richards; corporate houses — Penta Paints Caribbean Limited, Angostura Limited, Columbia Marketing and Contracting Company, Peter’s Paint Supplies and National Canners Limited; and Ralph Coutain, Agency Manager, Colonial Life Insurance Company Limited, most of it within the past two years. The modern type tables donated by the Multicultural Club are already in use by the Ministry of Education in junior schools today. Each table comprises six individual triangular shaped sections of similar design. The sections can either be joined together, used individually, in pairs or in threes, thus allowing the class teacher a certain degree of flexibility in the placing of the children at any given time. When the six parts are placed together in position they form your typical circular table.

Monica Headley, a director of the Multicultural Club, would emphasise at the presentation ceremony that a focus of her Club was the assisting in the motivating of children to have positive goals, as well as being able to get that needed chance in achieving those goals through early childhood education. Her group, she insisted, wanted the pre-schoolers at All In One develop to their fullest potential, and would assist in that regard. Meanwhile, even as Peter Aleong, Chairman of the Board of the All In One Child Development Centre, thanked and praised the Club for its sponsorship of the school furniture, and expressed pleasure in its involvement in the Centre, he nonetheless challenged individual members of Multicultural to take part in activities at All In One. Aleong declared he would like to see them attend school functions, for example the Centre’s Speech Day. Be involved, he said for, as he sought to explain, All In One was not simply a school, but a Beetham Gardens community function. There was a vibrant Parent-Teacher Association, and the Centre’s Board needed the presence of members of the Multicultural Club at meetings of the PTA to help in motivating them. But the piece de resistance would come from All In One’s principal, Wayne Jordan, who in an impassioned address described the Club’s donating of the school furniture as an investment in the future of the young people of Beetham Gardens.

There was a need, he cautioned, for the future young men and women of the Beetham Gardens community to acquire life skills, and he saw the intervention by the Multicultural Club as a crucial step in that direction. He expressed regret that for far too long the fullest possible development of those skills had been neglected.  Admittedly, the results of the Centre’s efforts can only be effectively measured in the medium and long term. But the time to begin to make that medium and long term transformation of a lower income community, many of whose residents are either underemployed or unemployed, is now. A new thinking is being and has slowly been forged in Beetham Gardens. It is not one that readily makes the headlines. But side by side with the school dropouts are young boys and girls from Beetham and its neighbour, Sea Lots, who are attending such front line secondary schools as Queen’s Royal College and Bishop Anstey High School. And of almost equal importance is that their attendance at these high profile secondary schools is not regarded by many of the primary schoolchildren in Beetham and Sea Lots as aberrations, a circus wonder, but as a challenge to them.

Many youngsters, they would relate at the Rotary Club of Central Port of Spain’s Adopt a Child presentation of vouchers for books and uniforms last year, had come up to them to say that they wanted to pass for these schools just as they had done, and asked how it felt to be students at QRC and St Hilary’s. Here, in an environment, in which so many had fallen by the wayside, and in which some had been mistakenly held up as virtual folk heroes, there were young teenagers who were being looked up to and saluted as role models because they had studied hard and won places in “name brand” schools. Hopefully, just hopefully, this approach by the youngsters represents a shift, tentative perhaps, but nonetheless one that should not be dismissed. It represents a challenge to the Multicultural Club and other like-focused NGOs to continue going into Beetham Gardens and the several other similarly circumstanced low income areas in Trinidad and Tobago. In this way the needed replacing of the mentality of “brand name” sneakers and threads with “brand name” education and schools can be achieved.