Re: Mausica memories

2007-Sep-24-2117hrs
For the first time today, I viewed Harry Joe's Children. What a flood of memories! On the back jacket, there is a picture of Noel Duncan and another student. Noel has the distinction of having Harry Joe as his Principal twice. He was a student of Woodbrook Secondary when Harry Joe opened that school. Later he came to Mausica when I taught there. So I too had him as a student twice.

See the reception for The Rt. Hon. Roland Michener, Governor G.eneral of Canada? Some students and I had the job of decorating the new principal's residence as a reception center for him, and the bigwigs in his entourage. We spent half the day sewing red drapery for the house. You couldn't write a petty cash order for more than ninety-nine dollars then, on the government's accounts, so I went into town armed with three of those to do the shopping for what was needed. Harry Joe bent the rules, and made some new ones for the success of the place called Mausica. When I see the broken down buildings in the video, I want to weep for the ethos that was the college. For as the Hon. Orville London said at the formal dinner, Mausica gave us all something, special, which we in turn gave to those others entrusted to our care. I would recommend, Selwyn, that a copy of the video be filed with the National Library of Trinidad and Tobago, if you have not yet done so..

The footage of the countryside, and of Caracas, could be of tremendous historical significance. Mausica was a leadership training academy, but we did not know it then. When we hear now of teachers going to school in TnT inappropriately dressed, I think of young men required to wear white shirts and ties, to walk in the rain from the dorms to class.

Times certainly have changed.

Linda Edwards