Dear Editor,
Confucius advised us to: “Chose a job you like, and you would never have to work a day in your life.”
The first job I ever had was as a high school teacher. I was only eighteen years old and had just finished my GCE “A” levels examinations. Because I received three “A” level passes, I was paid as a trained teacher. My salary was $600.00 per month, and I taught Mathematics at Tutorial High School, between 1982 – 1984. I was terminated from my teaching job, after I refused to join the PNC and get a PNC “party card.”
Barred from public service employment, I went to live and work with my relatives at Mahaicony and plant rice. I lasted a grand total of ten days in this job. It rained every day, and I could not reconcile moving from “socks and shoes” to bare feet, because the mud comes up all the way to your knees. The final straw that ensured my exit was the ten feet “Camoudie” perched nearby, eyeing me for his next meal. It is a quantum leap of having thirty pairs of eyes gazing up adoringly at you every morning, to a predator that wants to have you in its stomach. At that moment, the confines of the classroom became magnified, looking like Buckingham Palace.
My next professional sojourn was to farm at Montrose back dam. Instead of a chalk and a duster, I am now carrying a 75 lbs. basket at the top of my head. I needed to walk nearly two miles to the public road for transportation to Bourda market. When it rains, the 75 lbs. become 150 lbs. Unlike teaching, when my work began at 8 a.m., farm work began at 5 a.m. every day! With teaching, your pay is assured, but not farming. I quit farming after rains flooded our farm thrice and killed all our crops and wiped out our investment.
An old high school acquaintance convinced me to work with him as a fisherman, out at sea. Even though I could not swim, I reluctantly joined him because I did not have any other means to support myself.
At Tutorial, I had two free periods every day and me and my fellow teachers would play chess in the staff room. No free time at sea, every moment was a fishing experiment.”
The first three days at sea were wonderful, blue skies and a splendid catch of red snapper. I felt I had found my calling and a new vocation. The second week we caught nothing, and quietly returned home – unheralded and unpaid. But it was the third week that did me in. A gigantic storm came from nowhere and with every monstrous downward wave dip, seems like it would be the one that would sink us. It was pitch dark and there was not a light in sight. I prayed and promised God that if he saved us, that I would never return to sea again. God saved us, and I have never stepped foot in a boat since then.
Finally, I decided to become an import-export wholesaler. I have been doing this job for forty years and employ more than 200 people now. Many of them have children, relatives and friends working both in the teaching profession and public service as a whole. In our discussions, these are our three most salient conclusions: Teaching is not a difficult job, teachers make the highest salary of all public servants and teachers have the most paid time off.
Respectfully submitted,
Jhagroo Persaud
