Charles F. Broome Memorial Primary School has won the Barbados Police Service’s Clean Yuh House Literacy Competition.
That school came out tops of 11 schools in St Michael with Abigail D. Murray’s written piece which won her best entry.
The second place went to Andre Turton of St Giles Primary School while Asha Cooke from Hindsbury Primary School placed third.
The competition was opened to all the primary schools in the District “A” Police Station catchment area. It was hosted in association with the Community Policing programme and Cargo BGI.
During the awards ceremony in the Prince Cave Hall at the District ‘A’ Complex in Station Hill, St Michael on Thursday, featured speaker and educator Francis Thompson told the students in attendance that it was important to have a clean heart and mind and to be wary of the company they keep.
Featured speaker Francis Thompson.
“Clean Yuh House comes from a statement that Jesus made in Matthew 7:15 . . . When we are talking about a house it is not where you live… it is where we allow our minds to reside, where we allow our spirits to reside, where we live in how we think and who we are,” he said.
Station Sergeant Christopher Griffith.
“When we are talking about cleaning your house it is also the environment . . . The environment that you are in is also important because your house may be clean but you may live in an environment that is not so clean. In the older times, as a society, we kept a clean house; Barbados was relatively clean because everybody had similar values.
Senior Superintendent Adrian Broome.
“You had to speak to people when you passed them on the street; you had respect for authority figures . . . But now that is not happening so much and that is why it is so important for us to clean our own houses now. The society has changed, some of the change has been good, but some has not been so good.”
Andre Turton receiving his prize from Senior Superintendent Adrian Broome.
Thompson also had a word of advice for parents, telling them to pay attention to what their children were getting involved in, their friends and how they treat others.
“It is important that we guard our children’s environment, that we are territorial. There is a foreign concept that has crept in about giving children autonomy and it is nonsense. Children, by their very nature, need to be cared for. The same way we put up motion lights at the house, the same way we make sure that before we go to bed we shut the house down and secure it, we have to do the same with our children.”
Sergeant Fionna Roach giving Asha Cooke her prize.
General manager at Cargo BGI David Codrington commended the officers involved in the programme for the work they were doing in the community and encouraged them to keep it up. (SZB)
