Cherish Holmes stands before a class of young people a mere two or three years younger than she and confidently engages them.
The 26-year-old is a tutor at the Barbados Community College but her daily encounters with students extend far beyond the subject of language. They discuss life, the challenging experiences of young people and the foibles of youth. In these areas she feels she is well placed to share and can easily relate.
“I was raised in Carrington Village. People like to call it the ghetto and that’s how people like to look at it,” she said.
Cherish knows well the discrimination associated with “where you are from”, as she recalled being a resident of Carrington Village, “ kind of took away somewhat because when you first meet people and they ask you where are you from and you say Carrington Village, they automatically put you inside a box.”
She learnt early that, “You have to work twice as hard to break out of that box and sort of surprise them with who you are and who you have grown to be.”
Yet she will not trade the knowledge gained from living in that environment “for anything in the world”.
“I think that gives me an advantage because I recognise then that there is more to society than what meets the eye.”
She attended Hindsbury Girls’ School before going on to Louis Lynch Secondary and later the Barbados Community College.
“I never stopped school. I kept going and I am still going,” she said.
Studying at the Barbados Community College she came into contact with mentors like lecturers Esther Phillips and Sandra Osborne, influencers who continue to help shape her and “people who at this stage have become my colleagues.”
“Esther Phillips had a great deal to do with the come-up of Cherish, if there is such a thing. We had shared a special relationship when I was a student in that she had recognised in me the sort of person that I wanted to be.”
Cherish, unemployed with a bachelor of arts degree in English literature after graduating from the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus in 2010 and “starting to become a little bit disillusioned . . . sitting down at home wondering why did I do all this school work and nothing is coming from it.”
It was Phillips who gave her the heads up on an opportunity at the Barbados Community College and convinced her she should take a shot at the position. “Mrs Osborne was going on leave and Miss Phillips remembered me,” she said.
This was a foot in the door into a career that she admits she is enjoying and which gave her the opportunity to join a faculty in which she has been warmly embraced.
“It is more a family, it is more like walking into a home than it is walking into a work room. When I first started working I had an excellent back-up staff, they made sure I was well prepared and that I felt the support which is always needed.”
She was 22 when she began teaching at the BCC and she acknowledged, “I am a young tutor, but I am also a student as well.”
She is currently completing a master’s in philosophy at the Cave Hill Campus, studying post-colonial literature and is on course with her plan to have her doctorate by age 30.
For this young woman, life is about always having a vision and pursuing and achieving goals. She is driven by her belief that “you have to work twice as hard to become who you are and to prove that to people”.
She also accepts that she cannot do it on her own, and never fails to turn to the mentors who have helped her to this reach this stage. Confidantes like Osborne she says, “sort of keep me on track because it is easy as a young person to become distracted or to be railroaded into the ways of life.”
She is focused, as senior regional educators discovered when she made an input at a teaching conference in Trinidad recently.
“I spoke a bit on how do we get these young minds to open and I said ‘you know what, you guys still think that you need the students to come to you in order to receive what you are trying to give them but I think we are in an age that we need to go to the students’.”
Carrington Village may have helped to shape her, but within that frame is a mind that craves bigger and better things. “I am afraid of failure; I am afraid of being one of those souls who just fall by the wayside,” Cherish remarked.
Her ambition sees her with fingers in different pies, and enthusiastically she declares, “I want to dabble with everything.”
Apart from her work in academia, she is currently interning at Caribbean Webcast Production and Black Mamba Productions exploring the business of production management. Her own company is also in her future plans.
“It is about spreading your talent and I think in this society, in hard economic times, that is something we have to do. You must be able to spread your wings,” she said.
The sports fanatic who many call “Miss Barcelona” because of her support for the Spanish football club, played for the local Professional Soccer School from 2007 to 2008. An attacking midfielder, she also played for the UWI.
Cherish is the last of her father’s 21 children and one of two from her mother. The support of both parents led her to remark, “Maybe in my parents I have something that others in my community do not have.”
She still gets an allowance from her father who she says is happy about the achievements of all his children.
“He never leaves any of us by the wayside. He is a very good father and he worries about me all the time. I am still their little girl.”
That love shown by mother and father makes her want to have a family of her own someday.
In her true philosophical style she added: “You live your life like most people won’t, so you spend the rest of your life like other people can’t.”
