An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

UWI prin­ci­pal, Prof Rose-Marie Belle An­toine, re­ceived the In­spi­ra­tional Ad­vo­cate Award at the In­ter­na­tion­al Women’s Fo­rum T&T’s (IWFTT) In­spi­ra­tional Women gala at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, in Port-of-Spain, last Tues­day night.

The awards were be­stowed on out­stand­ing women in T&T who are role mod­els and who have demon­strat­ed out­stand­ing lead­er­ship.

The oth­er re­cip­i­ents were Di­ana Ma­habir-Wy­att, who re­ceived the In­spi­ra­tional Cham­pi­on of Women Award, and Ani­ka Plow­den-Corentin, who re­ceived the In­spi­ra­tional Emerg­ing Leader Award.

Belle An­toine, who has been an ad­vo­cate for so­cial jus­tice and hu­man rights over the years, told the room of pow­er­ful women in so­ci­ety that she cred­it­ed her fam­i­ly and The UWI for her suc­cess over the years.

“In truth, there is so much in­equity and in­jus­tice in this world that I do not know how to keep silent. While I, as an In­de­pen­dence ba­by, might have been born with this pas­sion against un­fair­ness—this need for so­cial re­form—it was my fam­i­ly, my pro­fes­sion, and the UWI, that al­lowed this to grow and gave me the tools to do some­thing.

“Then my pro­fes­sion and the UWI—al­ways cen­tred around re­gion­al de­vel­op­ment—gave me op­por­tu­ni­ties, in­clud­ing con­sul­tan­cy work and key po­si­tions. These had the pow­er to change pol­i­cy and di­rec­tion and to rep­re­sent the mar­gin­alised, the voice­less, not just in the re­gion, but be­yond, such as my work in Wash­ing­ton lead­ing the In­ter-Amer­i­can Com­mis­sion on Hu­man Rights,” the UWI prin­ci­pal said.

Hu­man rights ad­vo­cate Ma­habir-Wy­att said there are pos­i­tive as­pects of this coun­try and peo­ple must recog­nise that.

“We live in a world where racism is para­mount in terms of con­flict, and you look around Trinidad and you look at all the dog­ma that we have, and no­body takes that on be­cause every­body cel­e­brates every­body else’s hol­i­days and cel­e­bra­tions,” Ma­habir-Wy­att em­pha­sised.

“We are very for­tu­nate; we don’t re­alise how for­tu­nate we are, and we don’t talk about what we have. I don’t think that there is one per­son here that does not have in their fam­i­ly and ex­tend­ed fam­i­ly, peo­ple who are of oth­er races or oth­er re­li­gions, of oth­er in­ter­est groups, and we take it for grant­ed.”

Ma­habir-Wy­att said she was grate­ful to re­ceive the In­spi­ra­tional Cham­pi­on of Women Award for her work through her bat­tered women’s shel­ter.

“I am in the last few years of my life. It is har­vest time for me. It is just be­ing here with peo­ple I ad­mire, re­al­is­ing that some of the things that are very im­por­tant to me have made a dif­fer­ence in peo­ple’s lives. The bat­tered women’s shel­ter went far be­yond where I ever dreamed it could go. I want to thank the men and women who picked up where I left off and went on to be the head of the Caribbean Cen­tre for Hu­man Rights,” she said.

Plow­den-Corentin, who re­ceived the In­spi­ra­tional Emerg­ing Leader Award for her work with Cho­sen Hands, a non-prof­it art and well­ness cre­ative pro­gramme, said the plat­form al­lowed her to re­shape the course of the lives of many young peo­ple in this coun­try.

“Fo­rums like these pro­vide op­por­tu­ni­ties to con­tin­ue to speak the mes­sage of hope in­to the lives of our fu­ture gen­er­a­tion. Through arts and cre­ativ­i­ty, Cho­sen Hands men­tor­ship ini­tia­tives were born, and Cho­sen Hands is now part of a glob­al move­ment where we net­work through the in­ter­na­tion­al vis­i­tor’s pro­gramme to over 23 coun­tries, with a uni­fied vi­sion of us­ing art as a ve­hi­cle to cre­ate so­cial change. Of­ten, it takes one sim­ple act to change the tra­jec­to­ry of one at-risk youth,” she said.