Brothers donate to school to honour late mum

Two St Joseph sons of the soil have launched a community initiative to pay tribute to their mother who died last month.

On Thursday, Anson and Lawrence Eastmond donated an undisclosed sum of money to the St Elizabeth Primary School – an institution that they said played an important role in their lives.

Vowing to make the gesture an annual one, Anson told Barbados TODAY the funds would go towards the 2024 graduating class at the school which has a total roll of 45 students.

“Our mother Gertrude Eastmond-Welch passed away at the age of 95 on April 1 and we wanted to do something in honour of her in the community,” he said. “She was a former student of this school and we wanted her memory to continue at the school. My brother and I and our entire family passed through this school and so we thought it was fitting to contribute to the institution that gave us a good grounding during the early years of our lives.”

The brothers, who also grew up a stone’s throw from the old St Elizabeth Primary which was in the heart of the village, said giving back to the community was important and they encouraged other past students to contribute in any way they could.

Principal Cheryl Marshall expressed gratitude to the Eastmond brothers.

Stressing the importance of links between the schools and the community, senior teacher Richard Browne noted that the deeper the engagement between the community and the youth, the less deviance there is.

He said: “Parents today have their hands full, they have to go out to work to earn their daily bread for their children. In the olden days, even if your mom and dad were working you had the backup system of granny, grandfather, uncles and aunties. But increasingly today, we have this separation whereby when parents go out, the children are oftentimes left alone.

“So if we can bring back that aspect of living, in which you were accountable not only to your mother and father but your grandfather, granny, uncles and even the next door neighbours, then, the deviance that we see today would have a much harder time to break through. There are many more people, many more eyes looking out for the children, so it would be good if that aspect of old time living was brought back into our society.”