HINDS BLASTS NUN

Government minister Fitzgerald Hinds blasted St Charles principal, Sister Adrianna Noel yesterday, saying that her “whimiscal” decision to refuse entry to dreadlocked Kalifa Logan was “flying in the face of the constitution, the law, morality and godiness.” The Government minister, who is a Rasta, called for the intervention of RC Archbishop Edward Gilbert and also said he hoped that Kalifa Logan’s mother would challenge  the decision in court. “Sister Noel has taken Trinidad and Tobago back to 1954 and the founding fathers of this nation must be turning in their graves. And what is most sad is that Sister Noel is honest, well-meaning, decent principal trying to do right, but clearly being sincerely and dead wrong on this particular matter,” he said. Hinds said his first feeling was a deep sense of sadness for Kalifa because she had become a public spectacle,  amid a national debate on a matter over which she had no involvement or control.

“She is just a young, clean, innocent child, who wrote her exam and was placed by the Ministry of Education in an educational institution,” he said. “And out of the blue Sister Noel decides that this child must suffer this trauma. I thought that this nation had gone a long way from that,” Hinds stated. He recalled that there was a time when there was discrimination because of our skin colour, social standing and status, in the entry for certain schools and institutions. he said he thought that the 1994 ruling on the hijab had taken the country past this problem. Hinds noted that in New York and London there were police officers with dreadlocks. He added that he sat in a court in London and saw a British judge, a Sikh, wearing a turban, rather than his wig. Citing Fatima College, Hinds said in many Catholic schools and churches, people with dreadlocks were now welcome. He also cited other church schools such as QRC and Bishops, saying that many “showed brotherly love to people with dreadlocks.”