Carifesta In Suriname

I headed a small delegation of fantastic Kittitian young people to the Carifesta festival held in Suriname this year August 2013. (Bear in mind that this is not a news blog, so one should not expect to find items here that carry the flavor or tone of a news item. I do not place here information that can be readily gleaned from sources elsewhere on the internet and other sources which would not take you inside the spirit of the events this blog addresses).
This year's Carifesta was  designed to showcase the talents and abilities of Caribbean young people, and so thousands of them flooded Suriname from all over the Caribbean region: young musician, dancers, dramatists, visual artists, cooks, name it they were in Suriname, and they were young.
What impressed me most was the quality of young people ranging from age 17 to 27 selected to be liaison officers ensuring the comfort and safety of the thousands of Carifesta participants from inside and outside of the region.
 The St. Kitts team was flanked by five of these beautiful, well mannered, well trained, intelligently young people. I asked one of them about the selection process ( there was a vigorous one before and after training for Carifesta) because I instinctively sensed that such young people could not have been randomly selected and placed with the Carifesta delegations. It was clear from the start that these were special young people with exceptional depth of self-management  and interpersonal skills. We can take a leaf out of the Surinamese book, after we have, first of all, found out what the government of Suriname is doing right, for it must be doing something  with the specific objective of shaping the development of its children, affording the managers of Carifesta the ability to source such vast depth of maturity existent among so vast a quantity of young people.

 My next blog will be about the drama presentation staged by the Antiguan Theatre Group.