Baptists to get secondary school

PM Kamla congratulates the Shouter Baptist community on 64 years of liberation!

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has promised members of the Spiritual Shouter Baptist faith another first — this time a secondary school.

Having been granted a day of their own to celebrate their faith, a primary school that had been promised to them by former prime minister Basdeo Panday, but was only built in 2012, Persad-Bissessar said shouldn’t they have a secondary school for their children.

“Your dream of equality in the country has been realised, and there is nothing that raise you more than a good education. Will you help me to give you your secondary school? Are you children of a lesser God? Then why shouldn’t your children get a secondary school?

“I give thanks that I was instrumental in you getting the first ever Shouter Baptist school in the country”God doesn’t sleep, he just wears pyjamas. I came back in 2012 build that school for you,” the Prime Minister said as she delivered the feature address during Spiritual Shouter Baptist Day celebrations held at the Council of Elders Empowerment Hall, Maloney, yesterday.

Persad-Bissessar said she did not come to talk to them about politics, but of faith.

“One hand cannot clap. We cannot be children of a lesser God, we are all children of the one God,” she said.

The Prime Minister said the Baptist did not cower and lose faith when they were being persecuted for practising their faith. She said Trinidad and Tobago was the only country in the world that celebrated the Shouter Baptist holiday the way they did.

She noted that she was the first person to be baptised in the Baptist faith to hold the office of Prime Minister.

“This is not the first time I have been here and God willing, it will not be the last time. I am the first woman Prime Minister in this country, but I will not be the last,” she promised.

Persad-Bissessar said she may not look like them, but the blood that ran through her veins was the same red as theirs.

Spiritual Elder of the Spiritual Shouter Baptist Archbishop Barbara Gray-Burke had high praise for Panday and the Prime Minister, and she urged her members to do the right thing at election time.

She said other political parties got their blood and sweat, and they never received anything. “What have they done for us? Would we go back to the same abusive situation? We are grateful for the People’s Partnership, and if we made it in 1995, we can do it again,” she said. …READ MORE