AS TOLD TO BC PIRES
My name is Dr Everold Hosein and I am the political leader of the Green Party, the least-well-known political party in Trinidad and Tobago.
I was born many, many years ago in the small sugarcane village of California, where everybody mind your business.
My father, a tailor, and my mother, a seamstress, had six children and a two-room barrack house. No pipe-borne water, no electricity.
Not sure they finished primary school. But my father read the newspaper every day and had great debates in his tailor shop and my mother taught me long division with a piece of charcoal and a brown paper bag.
We eventually got an upstairs-downstairs house, with water and toilet in the house. Quite an adjustment from the latrine.
Every morning I swept the black soot from the Brechin Castle sugar factory off our gallery.
I work now as a consultant to the WHO, Unicef and other UN agencies.
I live now wherever my head hits a pillow. Some nights it is at home in Indianapolis, some in New York. Some nights it is the Chaguanas family home of a Presentation College friend. Some wherever I am working.
I have slept in about 150 countries over the years.
I am married to Dr Barbara Hosein, originally Barbara Hughes from Kansas, a retired biochemist, now an artist.
Dr Megan Hosein, our youngest daughter, is a psychiatrist. I am hoping she will get me into one of those supervised trials on psychedelics, LSD and psilocybin!
Our son Jinnah is IT VP at Boeing in Seattle.
[caption id="attachment_1004245" align="alignnone" width="568"] Dr Everold Hosein works as a consultant to the WHO, Unicef and other UN agencies. -[/caption]
The eldest of our four grandchildren is off to university this year.
I have lived in the US for many years. But still don’t quite understand baseball.
I went to a village pre-school run in her home by a local teacher who taught full-time at California Government Primary. Miss Rose wore layers of makeup to make her skin lighter.
The Esperanza Presbyterian Primary school building I left in 1957 is the same building now: exactly the same classrooms, no walls between them.
In Trinidad, I learned the f-word was spelt with an “o.” In the US, the “o” was replaced by a “u.”
I was lucky to get into Presentation College, San Fernando. I completed A-Levels in physics and mathematics.
But my true education was from books borrowed from the Carnegie Free Library. Four family members signed up, meaning I could borrow 12 books at a time.
In my final year I won the Jaycees national public speaking contest. My topic, The Traffic Problem, will be just as relevant now.
I remember walking along the road to the California mosques with my father for the two Eid prayers, sometimes for the nightly Ramadan prayers. I remember children shouting “Madinga,
Madinga!” Years later, in The Gambia, I realised many African slaves were Mandingo Muslims. How Madinga became an insult for all TT Muslims, I don’t know.
A Muslim colleague says there is no such thing, but I describe myself as a non-pra
