-wants the company of Spanish speakers
Centenarian Mabel Connell nee Costress, who celebrates her 104th birthday today, hopes to one day live to see 110 and is requesting that Spanish speakers visit her at the St Joseph Mercy Hospital where she is a resident patient so she can converse with them.
When Stabroek News visited the spritely woman at the hospital yesterday, she was sitting outside her room waiting for her lunch to be served, asking the nurses to comb her hair in a neat fashion. Connell, who has been living at the hospital for the past three years, told this newspaper that she has all of her faculties intact except for a little dimness in her eyes now and then which she said “just keep hampering me”. She is able to walk around her quarters as well as the corridors of the hospital assisted by a walker. According to a nurse who cares for the elderly woman, staff would sometimes warn Connell about coming off of her bed. Connell told this reporter, with a chuckle, that the nurses usually place a rail next to her bed to keep her in. Connell said she usually retires to bed around midnight and is usually up the following morning before the sun rises.
Connell told this newspaper that she was born at Agricola on the East Bank of Demerara on July 8, 1905 but spent most of her life at Hope, on the East Bank of Demerara. She said she began attending school at the tender age of three and competed with her older classmates in every area even though she was the youngest. She said her father worked at a sugar plantation here in Guyana as a chemist but left her and her mother and went to Africa where he lived until he died. Connell, who bore one child, a son who lives in the United States, said she started working around the age of 17 as a teacher while doing part-time work with the Chronicle newspaper as a typist. She boasts that she could still “handle” the typewriter at her age noting that age is just a number.
The elderly woman, who now and then checked the time on her watch, said that she enjoyed playing the piano in her youth, noting that she can still do so today. She pointed out that an important part of her life she wanted to share with persons is a period of time during the First World War when she used to make hats with her mother to sell around her neighbourhood. The hats were made with coconut branches. Connell said she was so well versed in the art that she could have made as many as six hats a day. When asked if she is still capable of making a hat, her blunt response was ’If!’
She said she likes to eat any type of food but noted split peas soup is one of her favourites. As a nurse asked Connell if she thinks she would live to 110, her response was ‘I going to live past that’.
Her advice to Guyanese is that persons should live life not to be a bother to anyone. She said one should always look forward to the day when the maker will be ready to take him/her home.
Before Stabroek News parted company with Connell, she got up on her walker and showed this reporter that she could walk around at her golden age. She also requested a Spanish book which she said will keep her occupied.
