myboardingschoolblog.net – is based on the book: The Grenada Boys Secondary School Hostel – Reminiscing on a boarding school life in Grenada.”
The GBSS Hostel was the boarding arm of the Grenada Boys Secondary School providing a home for rural boys, a small percentage of the School’s population. The book is about recognition, and about saying ‘Thanks’ for an educational and life experience at the Grenada Boys Secondary School Hostel in which I, the author and others were grounded during our adolescent lives. The book is also about sharing a piece of Grenada’s educational history with current generations, another taste, as it were, of Grenada and the Caribbean. The Hostel was ‘Grenada’s best kept educational secret’, shining in academic performance as well as in Sports. The key to Hostel life was discipline – in study, in play, and in other aspects of social life. The Hostel had only one written rule: ‘A breach of common sense is a breach of Hostel rules’.
The Hostel experience was one which provided the boys with opportunities with which they could purify their own ‘base metals’ into ‘polished gems’. The process was one “of character and personalities unfurling under its offerings. Think of how a nutmeg tree reveals its treasures of nutmeg and mace. The tree bears a pod which is closed and green when immature. If the pod and its contents are no good, it wrinkles while green and falls to the ground where everything rots. As pods mature they grow in size, they turn yellow and progressively split in two halves to reveal bright red mace ensconced on a dark shiny nut. The open pods then fall to the ground from where they are picked up and another journey begins. Such was my Hostel experience”. The comparison is immortalized in the words of one Hostel Boy, Leon Wells (d): “So many of us came to the Hostel as brash, crude, `ignorant’, unhewn base metals, and left as polished gems.” This book is about that process.
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*“You are not mentally developed by what you read, but by what you think about what you read.” Wallace D.Wattles.
Enjoy your reading!!
Winston J. Phillips.
**For availability see ‘Contact’ page
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