I SHALL RISE, AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME - Have a read, HL!

[Farmah]

A feel-good story! Shows that ambition and drive can move mountains. Many people who originated from the poor innercity communities (Tivoli, Jones Town, Jungle, Rema, Southside, Denham Town, Hannah Town, Greenwich Town etc.) can recount a true story of someone they know who overcame all the odds to make something of themselves. I could tell of quite a few! However, here's one that warmed my heart recently.

In 1991 I met a bredrin who came from Jamaica. Trying to get a job as a dishwasher in a Miami hotel, he was stuck with the difficulty of filling out the application form. I filled out the form for him and he signed his name in a fashion which exposed his unfamiliarity with a writing tool. He was about 30 years old at that time and, like Buckley, had been through hell and fire before finding his way to the USA. I remember that after Hurricane Andrew in 1992 he vowed to learn to read and write and to eventually get his high school diploma. He kept in touch over the years, calling me at least once a year to hail me up. Last week he gave me a call with the wonderful news that he had completed his Masters in Accounting and preparing for his CPA exams.

Now if you only knew about his early years in Rema, having never been to school, and how he arrived in the USA, then you would see that these things happen more frequently than one might think.

[Muadib]

Careful how yuh chat bout di "Intellectual Ghetto".

Mutty Perkins sight dat rake lang time.. of course him nevah guh University suh what him know bout it.. ?

LOL !!!

Where is the self-appointed UWI Defender ?

[MdmeX]

This is a story that warms my heart... did Wignall make this up?

CE is overrated and archaic! Mr. Minister, please have the vision and balls to change, revamp our educational system. UWI...clean up your act!

Peter R: CE (Common Entrance) does not exist anymore. That was replaced by GSAT!

[Sir X]

In order to revamp you would have to get rid of them all , its an old boy nepotistic system that ails all society of Jamaica.

[Peter R]

This is a story that warms my heart... did Wignall make this up?

One point that struck me ( no backhand slap Sickko) is the fact that he "failed" the Common Entrance twice!

Next thing is the allusion to the "old boys" club that UWI seems to be...

CE is overrated and archaic! Mr. Minister, please have the vision and balls to change, revamp our educational system. UWI...clean up your act!

[Mosiah]

I SHALL RISE, AND YOU CANNOT STOP ME
Mark Wignall
Sunday, June 28, 2009

In a section of the rough, inner-city community known as Southside, where in 1978 soldiers from the JDF enticed 14 men from the environs, took them to the Green Bay firing range then, based on pre-arrangement, opened up fire from a well-concealed machine gun, killing five of them, there are two schools. One is named St Michael's and the other is the more well-known General Penitentiary (GP). In strange, if not crude fashion, they are next door to each other.

With the pretence long forgotten that any one of our hard-core prisons is a correctional facility, many felons enter its seemingly impregnable, towering, sturdy brick walls confounded by their criminal transgressions, but years later when they leave, they are masters of the game. In a sense, therefore, and with sincere apologies to those few who have made the exit as better men, GP gives us a guide as to what a significant cadre of its graduating class looks like.

In 1976, after two failed attempts at the Common Entrance, 13-year-old Winston Buckley, previously left in the care of his desperately poor and ailing grandmother, passed the Technical Entrance Exam for Kingston Technical High School. In that year only he and another student, Barry Mascoe, passed from St Michael's, which had a population of around 500 children.

I attempted to relate the events which followed in the young man's life (Winston Buckley and the UWI Math Department, Observer, December 12, 2004) which was a mixture of horror story, fairy tale and a ton load of hope.

As I wrote then, young Buckley was charged with something deep inside of him to succeed despite the odds. Born in 1963, he was handed over to his grandmother after his mother left for foreign shores. Poverty was his constant companion, and hunger became a way of life.

At 11 years of age, he failed the Common Entrance Exam. The following year, 1975, he failed it again. Living in the ghetto, the young Buckley saw the guns, the streets, the hustling, but something deep inside was pushing him towards something which he felt was waiting for him.

He couldn't quite see it but he knew it was there. It didn't take the shape of a gun or drugs or living off the streets. It was just there, bigger than what he was seeing around him every day. In 1976, quite a number of things happened to him.

One, the terrorist gunman in the ghetto was given birth as 13-year-old Winston passed the Technical Entrance Exam to attend Kingston Technical High School. Then, to top it off, his grandmother, a seller on the streets, had a stroke.

At that juncture he would be forgiven if he had simply dropped out of school. In fact, it would be expected of him to look to the streets for his survival. Some friends, drugs, guns, robberies. But that inner force was impelling him to go on. Years before when his mother simply handed him to his grandmother before she left for foreign shores, he never thought it would get that bad.

Unable to fend for herself, Winston's grandmother was removed from the place they rented and taken to the Eventide Home, then known as Alms House. In a matter of weeks, he too had to leave the premises because no rent was being paid. At 13 years of age he was homeless.

'Sometimes I slept at school. Other times I would steal into people's yards and sleep under boards or on dry garbage," he said. Young Buckley would walk around in the late evening, pangs of hunger playing havoc with his system. A street light, a bar - anything which gave him light would be where he would complete his homework.

When the youngster went to visit his grandmother, he would lie to her about his living conditions, telling her that he had found 'relatives' and they had taken him in. In his state of utter deprivation the child still found it in him to protect his grandmother from worrying over him.

"My grandmother was always crying over me, but when I left, it would be me crying over her. You should see the huge rats eating at old people's feet, arms, while they just lay there, too sick to even move."

In the 1980 fire at Eventide Home which claimed the lives of 144 old women, Buckley counts his grandmother as one of them and saw it as a blessing. Many of these homes kept by the state, from the fire traps in children's homes to some of the parish hospices, are essentially refuse dumps like the one at Riverton City, only, in cases like Eventide, as far as the state was concerned, human garbage was dumped there.

I wrote in 2004 that, by the time he turned 15 years of age, Winston had mastered the art of living off nothing. He slept and showered at friends' homes. At times he discovered relatives but they made it known that one night over was enough. His clothes were falling apart on him, but still he remained in school against the odds. At close to 16, the pressure got to him and he almost gave up on the school work.

Two things happened which led to important changes in his life. Very strong on Maths, the youngster was approached by one of his classmates who was struggling with the subject. A deal was cut. Buckley would teach him Maths and the boy's parents would give him a place to stay at nights. After about three years sleeping in the school's bathroom, in people's backyards and anywhere which provided some warmth, he finally had a bed in which to sleep.

With the assistance of a teacher, Buckley was provided with lunch and a job with a credit union from 3:00 pm to 6:00 pm. When he eventually took his O' Levels he got distinctions in Additional Maths, Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Engineering Science and credits in Engineering Drawing, Engineering Workshop and Geography. At CXC he got a credit in English Language.

As a bonus he also sat A-level Maths while still a fifth-form student and secured a credit. At 17 he entered UWI. In 1984, he graduated with a special degree in Maths with First Class Honours. After that he tackled an MPhil, normally a two-year course. He did it in seven months, but the archaic thinkers at the UWI would not give him the award until the two years ran out. While waiting for it, he taught Maths at the Ivy league University of Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Fulbright Scholar.

Now, that is what I call 'Turd Worl' thinking on the part of the UWI, Mona.
Forced off the teaching staff at UWI

In March 2004, Professor Mervyn Curtis, then head of the Maths Department, wrote a letter to Mrs Deborah Charles-Smythe, the assistant registrar, recommending the re-appointment of Winston Buckley.

Professor Curtis is an expatriate who had successfully produced 22 PhD students, including two Jamaicans. In March 2004, Curtis had 12 Jamaican post-graduate students under his supervision.

One part of the recommendation read, "Mr Buckley is the most hard-working and dependable lecturer in the Mathematics section. He is, by far, the most effective lecturer of Mathematics, achieving consistently high pass-rates, which average over 85 per cent. Feedback from the students' evaluation is consistently above four out of a maximum of five.
"As co-ordinator and principal lecturer in the summer school programme, Mr Buckley has set a record in the department by increasing the courses from four in 2000 to 13 in 2003; while maintaining profitability for each year.

"Mr Buckley teaches both Mathematics and Actuarial Science courses, and is the only lecturer on staff capable of teaching all courses offered by the department. His service to the university includes turning around the troubled M21A course in 1999, achieving a pass rate of 70 per cent, up from 23 per cent...

"In 2002, he initiated the now yearly recruitment exercise of the Actuarial Science students/graduates by Watson Wyatt Worldwide, the giant actuarial consulting firm.

"Mr Buckley is currently pursuing his PhD under my supervision and is performing outstandingly; he has already proved two theorems that will produce at least two journal papers. I consider him to be a very bright young man."

All that about a man who, 20 years before, had been a child on the streets, refusing to accept that where he was physically was where he resided mentally. He fought against odds that 95 per cent of children, faced with them, would buckle under, yield to the streets and add to the mass of poverty and criminality strangling our beloved island.

The UWI Mona Maths Department, at the time, steeped in more campus politics than bringing life and money profitability to the university, insisted that Buckley had to go. At that time, the young man was failing to abide by the cloistered rules of not talking out on burning issues. He who had seen life from all ends and was no mere rebel fighting unidentified causes, was seeing potential where the tenured, protected lot could not.

In 2004, he left the UWI Mona Campus and, with a few professors, tried his hand at starting and running a business school. In an environment hostile to any business concerns that had no politically genetic ties, an increasingly impatient Buckley left for the USA.

Winston Buckley today
Jamaica's loss was, as usual, America's gain as that country absorbs our brighter, more effective human resources. Many of those in academia in Jamaica are steeped in pure academe and cannot see, or refuse to, that unless one can meld the rigours of the lecture hall with the rough and tumble of national development and survival, all the activities at UWI Mona would be only useless fluff guaranteed to turn out students excellent at teaching and more suited for party politics than making one's way in a hostile world environment ruled by the pragmatic but unfriendly capitalistic mode of producing goods and services.

Buckley did his PhD in three years in Financial Mathematics. He is in the process of doing research on, among other things, stock returns and stock price predictability, derivative securities and central bank interventions in the foreign exchange market. He is in the process of becoming a professor of Finance and Actuarial Science at a well-known business school.

Not bad for a little 'tear-up-clothes boy' from the ghetto.

observemark@gmail.com