If we are truly open to them, we will gain lessons in life from the usual sources – parents, teachers, religious leaders, writers, etc. – but also from chance encounters or some uninvited wisdom or event that comes to us, rather than our going to it. The lesson can be about honesty, or being truthful or kind; it can be about love for animals or concern for the environment, or bonding with family, or the power of friendship, and the lessons can take their time in arriving, so that, in my case, it was as a teenager growing up in New Road, Vreed-en-Hoop that I learned the importance of respect and honesty in a memorable conversation with my mother Zepherina, and here I am, some 70 years later, and a stirring example on the subject of love between a man and a woman lands on me out of the blue. It came through an encounter with an Amerindian couple, Lionel and Noella, who spent about a week in our house in Oleander Gardens while Noella was getting medical treatment at the Georgetown Hospital Outpatient Department. The couple had come here through the efforts of my wife Annette Arjoon-Martins, who had learned of Noella’s situation.
