Chapter1
My CanadianRoots

So, where do we start? I guess the most obvious thing to do is to start on June 21, 1948. I was born at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with no name. To my parent’s surprise, I came out a girl. I was supposed to be a boy named Robert, after my father. A dear friend of my parents, who seemed to think he had a special skill and could look at a pregnant woman’s stomach and determine the sex of the unborn child, declared that I was a boy. Well, my mother’s belly was shaped for a boy, he said, but out popped me—a beautiful, should I say that again, a beautiful baby girl, with no name. My parents frantically rushed to give their dear baby girl identity and creatively added an “a” to Robert.

I am smiling because my mother once told me that it took six years before I arrived. She amused me when she said my father regularly rushed home during his lunch hour from the train station, where he worked. The rest I do not think I need to describe! They wanted a child so very much. Mother used to cry when she saw young women with their babies. But it finally happened; they did not care what gender the baby was. To my surprise, not long ago, I found the actual papers from the hospital that my mother had kept all these years.

We do not have a choice in what parents we get. Fast forward to Antigua, that is what I used to tell some of our young trainees who were in our youth at risk, skills training, programs at the Gilbert Agricultural and Rural Development Center (GARD Center), where I worked for over 27 years. The horrid and heartwrenching stories I used to hear of the treatment some parents meted out to their children made an indelible imprint on me. Yet, my parents, Florence and Robert, gave my sister and me all that anyone could desire. Not money, not things, but love, understanding, trust, kindness, humility, ability to forgive, commitment to family, and most importantly, they introduced us to the God I have grown to serve. These and other values helped shape and make my sister and me into who we have become today.

I think of the encouragement that I received when I switched elementary schools, moving into a new neighborhood. I found myself far behind the students in this new school; my parents dried my tears when I could not understand things and gave me hugs that reassured me that I would make it. I think of what I may have become if I had received the complete opposite, like many of the young people I helped and who desperately needed that love, those hugs.

One day, I came home crying from elementary school because my teacher tried to embarrass me in front of the class. “Roberta, can you tell us what a wren is?” I had never he