AS TOLD TO BC PIRES

My name is Antonia Grazette-De Barros and I love to make other people smile.

I’m originally from Carenage, L’Anse Mitan, the little-little back road.

Now I reside in Barataria with my husband Mark De Barros.

We don’t have any children as yet but we want. Family life is the best thing.

My Grazette family still close-knit, still go to the same church together, plan if one person pregnant, we have transport, everything in order.

I was in my mom’s food place and Mark came by. We had a mutual friend he would come with and we would interact.

And then Mark started to come by himself. And that is how it kick off from there. That was, like, 2011.

Once the mutuality is there, and you all could communicate, you have the same goals, heading in the same direction to accomplish things, like getting your own home and stuff.

I have four sisters and two brothers.

I am the middle child for my mother, a hard position. You doing the majority of the work when Mummy gone. You have to make sure you cook, clean, mop out, sweep out, iron school clothes, not just for you.

But those are the days that bring back the memories, now that you grow up and living with your husband and your sisters with their significant others. Is times like that you’s really miss.

I come from a big-big, close-knit family and we all reside in one yard, aunts, uncles, cousins, everybody together.

When parents go to work, we home with we grandmother. We making sweetbread, we making pone, we making khurma, all kinds of dramas we making.

We had childhood days playing moral, hopscotch, hide-and-seek. Climb tree, fall down and get cut. All good memories.

Primary school was St Ursula’s Girls’ Anglican.

When I wrote SEA, they had now start zoning children and I end up getting zoned Diego Martin Junior Sec with my brother for three years.

Then I end up at South-East Port of Spain for two years.

The school wasn’t bad at all. They had really good teachers like my food and nutrition teacher, Miss Benjamin, and my maths teacher, Mr Ali, my homeroom teacher.

I enjoyed school and did well… in subjects that I liked! But I made sure I didn’t fail the other subjects.

I’m a believer. When you see so much misery in the world, that is when your faith is being tested.

You have to know that when you say you are for God, you have to stand for God.

If BC Pires asks what God did for me, I reply, well, he send his son to die to take away the sins of the world. Because he know that his people would fall short. We would fall short at times. Nobody’s perfect. The perfect being was here already!

When BC Pires says that all religions were designed to elevate men and subjugate women, I say that it’s the first time I ever heard somebody say that.

And I’ve never thought about it in that perspective. That is food for thought.

I learned to cook in my childhood and, while I can’t say I could cook everything, I could cook the majority.

I love food on the whole but if I was to say I had a specialty dish, I like anything pasta. You