To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly Chief Sec­re­tary Kelvin Charles’ has ad­vised To­bag­o­ni­ans to “nev­er set­tle for medi­oc­rity.”

He made the com­ment as he de­liv­ered the fea­ture ad­dress at the an­nu­al To­ba­go Day Awards at the Shaw Park Cul­tur­al Com­plex on Tues­day in cel­e­bra­tion of the 38th an­niver­sary of the cur­rent To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly.

Call­ing on To­bag­o­ni­ans to recom­mit them­selves to lov­ing To­ba­go, Charles said: “We must chal­lenge our­selves to a new lev­el of pa­tri­o­tism for this is­land and by ex­ten­sion our beloved coun­try. It can­not be that those on the out­side who will vis­it our shores see more val­ue and have a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion for our own land far more than we do.”

He said the re­cent­ly re­brand­ed tourism strat­e­gy had de­fined To­ba­go as be­yond or­di­nary but the tourism prod­uct is on­ly as good as To­bag­o­ni­ans make it.

“The time has come for us to un­der­stand that you do not have to be di­rect­ly in­volved to have an im­pact in the tourism in­dus­try. The truth is by virtue of you re­sid­ing in To­ba­go you are a part of the tourism land­scape,” he said.

He said every­one is a part of the tourism prod­uct as is­landers’ ef­forts to smile, greet tourists or give di­rec­tions “with a touch of pa­tience” is part of the tourism prod­uct.

This year’s awardees in­clud­ed Gwyneth Arm­strong and Dr Robert T Yorke, who were award­ed the To­ba­go Medal of Ho­n­our Gold for their con­tri­bu­tion in the sphere of mu­sic and con­tri­bu­tion to the tourism sec­tor re­spec­tive­ly.

An­nette Archer won the To­ba­go Medal of Ho­n­our Sil­ver for her con­tri­bu­tion to ed­u­ca­tion and com­mu­ni­ty ser­vice, while Martha Archer was al­so award­ed the medal for her con­tri­bu­tion in the sphere of sport.

The To­ba­go Gold award, the high­est ho­n­our, recog­nis­es peo­ple who have made tremen­dous con­tri­bu­tions to the is­land’s de­vel­op­ment while the sil­ver and bronze medals recog­nise those who con­tributed sig­nif­i­cant­ly to To­ba­go over the past year.

No awards were giv­en last year as the awards or­gan­is­ing com­mit­tee re­ceived names for on­ly three peo­ple who fell be­low the re­quired nom­i­na­tion stan­dard. • See Page A4