From Island Boy to Professor

I lived on the middle street about two hundred yards from my primary school. My playground was the sandy streets, sandy beach, and especially my uncle’s hotel property called Tom’s Hotel. I was an average student who attended the public school on the island. I clearly remember my first day of infant one. I went to school, put down my bag outside, and lost my bag. I cannot remember how I got it back, but that was the first clue that told me that I was not the most intelligent human. My mom was a housewife and my dad was a fisherman. We lived in a little wooden house, very humble. All our beds were in one little area. Our door was a curtain. My mother reminded me on a daily basis to do my homework and to study. I preferred running to the beach, burying my feet in the hot, white sand, and playing all sorts of games with my cousins. Games such as cantaro (That was a game with a ball and after being caught, we were freed after someone sneaked to kick the ball from the catcher.), steal the bacon, top, marbles, hop skotch, and police and prisoner were very popular. Even during our 11:30am to 1pm lunch break, I used to run to my uncle’s dock, fish a little, or swim a little, go home for lunch, then return to school. It was a very fun childhood. Most of my primary school days were gratifying. Apart from the usual academic life, our early mornings, breaks, and afterschool activities were filled with many, many exciting games. We played our version of baseball with a piece of stick and a tennis ball and we called the game “bat”. I had a great hand and could throw a ball at someone or a base and hit it on the spot. With that ball in my hand, no one dared to move. We played football on the sandy field behind the school building. I played well, but was not the best player. One of my classmates had a great left foot and could curve the ball from the corner spot directly into the goal posts. We played chase under the building in the soft brown sand. It was not my favourite game unless we were playing the game called cantaro. We indulged in playing marbles and top on the street in front of the church. I had a very mean top. It could break a top in two and the boys were very afraid of my toy. Two of the boys in my class were also very good at dancing their tops and hitting tops to leave the mark of their galvanized nail in someone else’s top. Sometimes the boys, and girls, were mean. At the age of nine, I was badly burned on a Christmas Day when my cousin and I were helping some British soldiers to light a grill. It was a cool morning and I was very excited to help. We started to light the grill. The fire was fine, but then it extinguished. My cousin took a sponge, soaked it in a container of gasoline, and sprinkled on the glow in the coconut husk. I was looking from behind him. Suddenly, the sponge ignited. My cousin got frightened and tossed the sponge behind him. The flaming soaked sponge fell on my head. My head blazed with flame, burning my skull. My aunt said she heard me screaming and ran out of uncle’s house. She saw my cousin threw me in the sand and used the sand to extinguish the flame. Moments later, my dad carried me to his boat, “The Miracle,” and took me to Belize City. My aunt drove me to my private doctor who took care of me at his home office. I woke up at my aunt’s home in Belize City and saw the scars on my face, my hair burned away, and my wrinkled ear. All my friends now called me a range of names about my burned right ear. I was teased on a daily basis. At that time, I had no idea about the concept of bullying. Every day at school was a torturing day. As a child, I did everything I could to make my right ear back to normal, but failed at all attempts. Every day after school, I remembered massaging it for hours hoping it would go back to normal, but of no avail. I grew my hair long to cover my ear. I attended my evangelical church every Sunday and prayed for a miracle, but it never happened. I cried many nights because of the bullying. I became isolated and profoundly withdrawn in my little world. In my mind, I did not let it affect my academic goals. Someday, I was going to show them that I would be a great person. I wanted to be a lawyer from a very young age and I focused on my goal as an introvert. In the classroom, we sat in pairs behind a wooden desk and a bench. It was about twenty-six students, but three different class levels together, standard four, standard five, and standard six with one teacher, the principal. She was strict. She stood up front, wrote notes on the chalkboard, and we had to write and study. Every week, we would get a list of twenty spelling words to study. Since I did not like studying, I devised a strategy to copy my spelling words during every test by imprinting them on my folder sheet the night before. I could see the words clearly as the teacher called them off her list. Eventually, I started studying since I wanted to stop cheating.