Parliamentary Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, Senator Irene Sandiford-Garner,??addressing the launch of the??"100 Great Barbadians"??campaign.
No stone will be left unturned in locating and showcasing each and every deserving son and daughter of the Barbadian soil, no matter where that person is currently sojourning.
This commitment was given yesterday by Parliamentary Secretary in the Prime Minister’s Office, Senator Irene Sandiford-Garner, as she delivered the feature address at the launch of the programme "100 Great Barbadians" at the Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Centre.
Encouraging all Barbadians to actively embrace the programme, Senator Garner noted that it was designed to identify and honour 100 individuals who had made an outstanding contribution to Barbados in various fields of endeavour.??
"While I am grateful to the historians for providing us with the data illuminating the lives of these heroes, I am fully aware that the remainder of us ordinary citizens now have a supportive role to execute in order to provide us with information about our other ???Builders of Barbados’. The men and women who are heroes in their own right," she stated.
The project, a collaboration between the Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS) and the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), was described by the Parliamentary Secretary as "an extremely encouraging and heartening development".
She added: "It is now incumbent on us in government to repay the loyalty and commitment to Barbados of deserving persons by enshrining their names and achievements on the pages of our new electronic document, which will be produced by the combined resources of the BGIS, the CBC and the Media Resource Department, formerly the Audio Visual Aids Department. Those persons fill us with a sense of pride and a feeling of achievement that this little island nurtured such stalwarts who are making sterling contributions to their host countries, the world over."
Senator Garner stressed that the project provided an opportunity for Barbadians to recommend for national recognition "those persons great or small in stature, but wise and wonderful in their human striving, for inclusions in this modern commemoration."
She noted that Barbados was lacking in studies of great Barbadians of either the past or present.?? The Parliamentary Secretary therefore suggested that the research being undertaken should assess the "complex personalities of these visionaries, builders, reformers and ???village mayors’ who, in their quiet way, made all the difference for our people in coping with the challenges of daily life".??
Senator Garner also called for the "special role of women in the various changing scenes of Barbadian life" to be focussed on. "In the process, this study will challenge accepted views which posit the notion that our women have been passive and concerned with lesser issues.
"This, of course, is far from accurate. Indeed, some of our histories and sociological studies must be completely rewritten to take account of the dramatic changes in the gender balance in our society," she observed.??