Day One: In which I make many new friends

Welcome to UWI Cave Hill!

Ed, one of the conference organizers, came to pick me and one other conference participants up at 8am for the first day. It was a wild drive -- I'm beginning to get the feeling all trips on the road are like that here. (Aside: now admittedly I've only been a few places outside the US, but each place I was struck by how chaotic traffic was compared to the way things are back home. And I'm from New York. We don't realize how good we have it with traffic regulations and a general culture of on-the-road rule-following.) On the way, I got to know Ed -- a professor of sorts at UWI -- and Martin, the other guest here at Rossomar. It turns out that Martin is a former Jesuit and a professor at UWI Mona, the campus in Kingston, Jamaica. He's lived in Jamaica for over twenty years, but originally hails from Cleveland, so his accent made him easier to understand. :)

The cricket field

We pulled up into a parking lot across from the school's big cricket field, pictured above. I went in, registered, got some tea and snacks, then took a little stroll outside the building while I waited for the rest of the conference participants to arrive.

Outside our conference center

Just behind the building where the conference was held, the hill dramatically dropped away, and the views of the turquoise water and bright blue sky were gorgeous. I took a few pictures, being the compulsive photo-snapping tourist that I am.

Tell me, would you have been able to help yourself, with views like these?


I managed to drag myself away from the vista in time for the commencement of the session. I was really blown away by how international the crowd was -- we had presenters from Nigeria, Brazil, Britain, Spain, Trinidad, Jamaica, and (of course) the United States. The first session featured the keynote speaker, an emeritus professor from Exeter, who gave a lecture on his social constructivist theory of mathematics and the implications the model had for math education. The next panel was entitled "Futures for the UWI [University of the West Indies]" (NB: "UWI," much to my enjoyment, was pronounced throughout just as a New Yorker would say "Huey," an erstwhile nickname of mine). The speakers discussed postmodernism and the UWI university system (which has three campuses covering fifteen countries in the Caribbean), the place of Indo-Caribbean philosophy in the Caribbean Academy, and "the Neo-liberal Re-orientation of Schooling." My favorite presentations were the latter two, the former by a professor at Brown, the latter by a professor at UIUC who looked and dressed like any of the locals but (to my ears at least) sported a full-on Irish brogue (!). When we finally broke for lunch, conversation spilled over into the restaurant where we ate Bajan favorites like macaroni pie, sweet pudding, steamed veg, and black-eyed peas with rice. The route to the restaurant took us past Cave Hill's Cricket Research Centre, a building nearly as large as the Multiracial Studies Centre down the road, and rather larger than the UWI Cave Hill Institute for Caribbean Law Centre. Clearly, they take their cricket seriously.

The CLR James Cricket Research Centre

The second session was no less exciting than the first. We kept the focus on the immediate challenges facing the UWI with a panel about elite versus mass education. The UWI is currently in a process of transition (in keeping with the decolonialization of other social institutions) from an elite university to one which provides "mass education." After a break for tea and biscuits, we reconvened for a panel on values in education. My two favorite presentations from this panel were one by a fellow grad student (yay little people! actually this guy was built like a linebacker, but I still felt a connection) at the University of Washington, who spoke about the relationship between fiction and moral education, and a professor of Asian philosophy from the University of Bridgeport, who talked about the need to teach non-Western philosophy for true liberal education in a rabidly shrinking (and therefore globalizing) world. After all this philosophizing, we were pleased to find in our conference folders and invitation to a reception on the Veranda over the cricket field, where we could meet and mingle with participants of the 27th Annual Conference on West Indian Literature. I have to say I didn't mingle with the literature folks, but I did chat with a bunch of philosophers and managed to get a nice shot of a clock tower facing out over the ocean just as dusk began to dim the sky.

Clock tower at dusk

Eventually, the party began to wind down, and Martin and I made the short walk together back to the Rossomar guest house. I learned about his interesting life history and missionary work with the Jesuits, but still managed to obey my sister's orders to watch as many sunsets as possible by keeping one eye on the sky.

The clouds had begun to roll in by that time (it rained later that night) but the sun still managed to set the rim of the horizon on fire.

The sun sets on a wonderful first day in Barbados!