“I must admit that Harvard taught me a great deal. It’s a great Club for mentoring. It was there I got my social grounding as a boy. And I would forever be grateful for the Club for the role it played in my life.” – Neil Shaka Hislop.
An international colleague shared a quote with me: “After all has been said and done, more has been said than done.”
We were having a conversation about issues of inequality and social injustices and our shared passion for finding solutions. It was an early Monday morning conversation, given the time difference between UK and T&T.
That conversation was the impetus for deciding to reference and use excerpts from my address at the Harvard Club 80th Anniversary Dinner held on Saturday at the Harvard Club. I had opened my address with the Shaka Hislop quote.
The Harvard Club is a Trinidad and Tobago cultural, sports and social institution with real history built, maintained and sustained by the pride and passion of its members over the past 80 years – that’s 29,200 days; 700,800 hours; 42.48 million minutes; 2.52 billion seconds of persistence, perseverance, resilience, commitment, dedicated volunteerism – day in, day out.
In 1943, the club, was established at an important juncture in the history of T&T. The founding members had a ground-breaking vision and mission for the social and cultural impact of the Harvard Club at a time when the elite and exclusive symbols of the social order of T&T’s society was shaped by the political, economic and social order of colonialism, World War 2 and the American Base.
