Life lessons my father taught me
Dr Terri-Ann Samuels, hippotherapist.
(Father is Garth Samuels)
He always used to say to me — because I am stubborn and difficult — he would say to me ‘just because you are right, doesn’t make you correct, so you need to humble yourself and learn from those around and understand why they think their answer is the right answer’. The most important lesson he taught me, too, is in terms of work ethics. He said more than just living within your means, it is taking every lesson, every knock that comes your way — the good, the bad and the indifferent — and turning it into more. So it doesn’t matter if you work for yourself or you work for other people, you must always remember to do the best you can with what you have.
Janelle Pantry, entrepreneur.
(Father is Kent Pantry)
The thing that I have learnt from my dad is that ‘hard work is the greatest of health’. He is a retired civil servant who spent at least 30 years working for the government and just gave it his all with so much effort and passion for his job. That is one of the things I have learnt definitely from him and that’s what I apply to working at Spaces and running Spaces.
Nadine Blair, radio personality.
(Father is Reverend Ronald Blair)
Daddy is very calm, he doesn’t let anything bother him. There are two things that come to mind. One is when my dad was going through some stuff and was getting some fight [from someone] and he chose to just pray about it and said he would watch the Lord deal with it. I was there telling him, ‘you need to go and say something’, and he was like, ‘no’. I just watched him pray and leave it alone and that was it. So I am still trying to learn that one, but it is something that I always appreciate about my dad — the fact that he allows the Lord to fight his battles. I also remember looking for something once and I couldn’t find it and I dug down the whole place and I went to him and I was telling him and he turned to me and said, ‘the Lord knows and He shows’, and I just said ‘okay’. From then, every time I am looking for something, I remember that line — ‘the Lord knows and He shows’, and the Lord really always shows me where to look.
Marcia Higgins, Counsellor and educator.
(Father was Norman Wilson)
He was a person who you could look up to and respect. He actually taught me about politics and even when I was growing up he would always have me on his shoulders because he saw me as [deserving of] being on a pedestal, which I didn’t really understand as a little girl. Even though I am struggling with various health issues like breast cancer, he is always on my mind saying, ‘yes you can get there, yes I know you can do this’. He knew I could become somebody who other persons could look up to and respect and he taught me plenty because I was his only girl.
Betty-Anne Blaine, children’s advocate.
(Father was John Bodden)
My father was a very, very special man in my life. My dad taught me about humility, how important it is just to be humble and to treat everybody with respect. The other life lesson I learnt from my dad was, I guess what you would call temperance, because he was a very balanced human being and so he would weigh one issue against another issue and try to be fair about his opinion, and so that’s how I try to live my own life. My dad never raised his voice, he never beat us as children, he would always just speak to us. As I got older, I made up my mind that I would never let a man abuse me, never, because that was the lesson that I learnt from my dad — that you never hit a woman. So my father taught me who a gentleman is, because he was a gentleman.
— Nadine Wilson
