It first began with the dream of a seven-year-old boy who was asked the question, “What would you like to be?” The boy who could barely speak managed to reply, “A lawyer”, and the hands of destiny seemed to have taken record.

To say it was no easy feat would be an understatement and the road to the Bar has been filled with twists and turns that have caused many to renege on their desire and passion to pursue this noble profession. However, I always told myself that, if no one else believes in this dream of mine, I must believe in myself. Therefore, I developed, very early, an inner drive that served me at every juncture of this very difficult journey.

It was very important for me to recognise my present conditions and to adjust and readjust as I journeyed on. Financial dilemmas confronted me and my family throughout, but it was under the tree of our national flower, the lignum vitae, that I faced one of the greatest threats to my pursuit of the Bar.

I remember quite vividly speaking to a senior member of the administrative body of the high school I attended at the time regarding the non-payment of my school fee and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) fees, with deadlines for both payments closing in like the Egyptian army on the children of Israel at the Red Sea. With nowhere to turn and having exhausted all options, destiny remembered the seven-year-old boy and rewrote the script for him in ways I have only read about in Shakespearian plays or seen in the miracles of the Bible.

It was during this time that I met a lady in the person of Florence Darby, who would quickly prove her virtue as a person to be appreciated for a lifetime and beyond. Through her and her influence on other people on the school board, I received the assistance I needed just in time to meet the Egyptian’s deadlines. I don’t know what it was about me that struck her, but we took to each other like steel to magnet. The fact that she was an attorney-at-law was icing on the cake as she grew to be a mother, mentor, and a friend.

I began to dream again, and I pursued it with relentless ambition that led me to coin my own mantra — A determined mind is ignorant of defeat — which became my guiding compass.

I finished high school with 18 subjects split between Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and CAPE and went on to pursue the bachelor of laws (LLB) programme in the Faculty of Law at The University of the West Indies, Mona, campus.

I completed the LLB progamme, having endured several of life’s knockout blows. By this time I was now working part-time and going to school full-time.

Then I transitioned to the Norman Manley Law School in 2019 and endured two years of gruesome studies that would bring a strong man to his knees. But not me, as mine were being held together by the dream of a seven-year-old boy.

I toiled onward even in the midst of the onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which arrived one month away from the first set of Bar examinations. When we finally heard the exams would be administered virtually we felt we were given an olive branch, and indeed we may have been. But those exams had students, like myself, sitting around a table for literally 24 hours, and so it was not as we had anticipated.

I passed the second and final sets of Bar exams in July 2021 and graduated Norman Manley Law School in November and then the Bar started looking closer and closer.

Fast-forwarded through what I would call a very interesting document filing process at the General Legal Counsel (GLC) and the Supreme Court, and we arrive at December 17, 2021, the day a son would be called to the Bar by the same mother, mentor, and friend who has been with him since that moment of destiny bounded them together. Thus, that which was first divinely bounded is now ‘legally’ binding.

willisjoseph92@yahoo.com