Contact Form

Name

Email *

Message *

Saturday, December 17, 2022

MITELIA PAUL A goal scoring machine:

 

 
   Mitelia Paul (left) with fellow hockey star Bertha Fernandes, meeting in Sydney after more than 50 years.




I started playing competitive hockey in 1959 in school and ended in 1968 in Kenya; I continued playing in Canada and the U.S.A. from 1968 to 1986 (I became a 24/7 work/sports mom; retiring from teaching (2015) after 50 years in an international teaching career - Kenya/Canada/U.S.A.)

FIELD HOCKEY CAREER
1959 - 1968 -  Nairobi - School Level - Dr Ribeiro Goan School 1st IX ( Kenya Inter-school League/Tournaments ) played against" Kenya High School"," Loreto Msongari", "Loreto Valley Road", "St. Teresa's School", "Duchess of Gloucester School")

Player/vice-captain/captain

1959 - 1968 - Kenya -  Club Level - "Ragtimers", "Railway Institute", "Goan Institute", "Caltex" -started at  age 13 - (player)
1959 - 1962 - Kenya 2nd IX - started at age 13 (player/vice-captain/captain)
1962 - 1968 Kenya 1st IX - started at age 16 (player/vice-captain)
1963 - 1968 - East Africa IX - started at age 16 (player)

1968 - 1986 - moved to Canada - age 21+
Played for "Eagles", "Goan Overseas Association" Ontario Provincial Team, Ontario/Canadian Masters' Teams (player/vice-captain/captain/umpire)
Played at club/representative level in Ontario, British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, Bermuda, New Jersey, New York, Florida, California, Washington D.C., Massachusetts

1968 -  1970 - recruited for Canadian National Team trials and recruited for academic/sports scholarships to multiple U.S.A. Universities
(had to decline because of future individual/family plans in my  adopted country, Canada)

1959 (age 13) to 1986 (age 40) Player/Umpire - F.Hockey at school/club/representative level  in Kenya, East Africa, Canada, U.S.A., Bermuda

Goals scored Kenya/East Africa - 30 goals
Goals scored Ontario Provincial/Masters; Canadian Masters - 33
Goals scored at School/Club level- 245
Total: 308 goals scored in 27 years

Badminton - Ontario, Canada
1968 - 1970 - played at club level; attained Ontario Provincial level in Singles/Doubles Tournaments

Only made possible by her late mother and father who kept every clipping they could find or made a note of the matches Mitelia played.

Friday, December 16, 2022

Memories of Kenya, what do you think?

Early pic of Muthaiga Club
 




An event in Uganda





Nakuru Stags Head Hotel
Early Nairobi
Another view of Nairobi



Removal of the King George statue


Railway workshop in Nairobi












Jamiya Mosque and the Macmillan Library


Tusks in early Mombasa



A very very early pic of the wonderful Oceanic Hotel in Mombasa







Nairobi School 













Lavington Nairobi





Kisumu

The East Africa campaign


 

Another day some where in Kenya


Karen







Government House



Craigs motors


Garden party in Mombasa


Fairview Hotel Nairobi




Demolition of the old Nairobi House

Mystery lady



A luxury safari camp


Main market in Nairobi



Just a little shamba work






Wednesday, December 14, 2022

John Noronha, in sport, music and life!

 

JOHN NORONHA

A keeper of memories




Canadian visitors John and his wife Gladys with their Sydney host Myrtle Coutinho and that other chap at Circular Quay.






OKAY on this particular occasion, being the Season of Christmas et al, I am treating myself to a little bit of bias. I only came to know John Noronha just a few years ago. However, during my years in East Africa, his name was often mentioned with some respect, not only for his tenure at Makerere University in Kampala but also as a budding musician and cricketer and a dabbler in hockey and all the other club sports that one tried one’s hand at least once or twice or more. Make no mistake, they did not say he was a sports star in the making but one of the guys.

What they did not know until much later was that our Man from Makerere was a super sleuth. No not a spy but a seeker of truths, especially sports truths. As the years rolled by, he accumulated heaps and heaps of pages with notes of this game or that bout or the emerging profiles and records of the leading athletes in East Africa. To this day, he still has one of the best newspaper and magazine collections about Seraphino Antao, the Kenyan Goan British sprinter, the first to win a set of double gold sprint medals in the 1962 Commonwealth Games in Perth Australia.

I guess his biggest gift is the instant-recall memory he has been blessed with all his life. Anyway, there is always heaps and heaps of clippings and his personal notes about particular events to fall back. He has often been described as a one-man, talking, writing library.

More than that I have always enjoyed his writings. He dedicated to the principle of journalist ethics, which is quickly disappearing from around the world, where the truth is often raped by social media and so-called journalists themselves continue to erode the sanctity of truth.

Hence, John Noronha will always serve the truth and nothing but the truth.

Stay strong, John. The world needs you.

I will publish a much fuller bio as soon as I get a copy.

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

JOHN GOMES: STRICT BUT A DEDICATED HEADMASTER

 

JOHN GOMES: STRICT 

BUT A DEDICATED HEADMASTER


I HAVE BEEN MEANING TO SHARE THIS NATION MEDIA STORY FOR A WHILE



Retired teacher John Gomes stands by a plaque at a dormitory at Gaichanjiru High School that is named after him. (Photos Nation Media)

 

 


 

By Elvis Ondieki

 

 

Every head teacher worth his or her salt ordinarily has a catchy nickname given by students. Retired missionary teacher John Gomes taught at various schools in central Kenya between 1960 and 1992 and some of the nicknames he picked along the way are “Hitler”, “Ghost”, “Dad” and “Mwalimu”.

Being the disciplinarian he was, many students have deemed the moniker “Hitler” befitting, as they drew parallels between Mr Gomes and the infamous German dictator.

He would stealthily patrol dormitories at night and if he caught someone smoking, at lunchtime the next day he would take the student to the dining hall, sit him on a table, light a cigarette, then take the student’s lunch. He would do the same with supper.

 

Such treatment, he says, helped stamp out smoking in the schools he taught.

That, and a notice he placed in every class that read: “A cigarette is a quantity of tobacco surrounded by white paper, and it has smoke on one side and an idiot on the other.”

 

Whenever a student proved incorrigible, he had a unique way of humbling them – sending them to dig up an anthill to find the queen.

Those who know about anthills understand that the queen is the hardest to find. You have to break your back digging up tough mounds of soil and deal with ill-tempered soldier ants with their sharp mandibles fervently guarding their residence. Once done digging, the student was required to present the queen to Mr Gomes on a plate.

 

Biology teacher

 

“I loved eating the queen,” Mr Gomes, a biology teacher who definitely missed a nickname capturing his funny side, tells Lifestyle.

“And then I was to take them back to teach them biology: This queen is so special that she lived in a royal chamber in the hill.”

 

To the boys in schools surrounding girls’ schools he led, particularly Moi Equator Girls Secondary in present-day Nyeri County, Mr Gomes was definitely a dictator of Hitler’s mould. Else, which headteacher takes note of the closing dates of neighbouring boys’ schools and closes his girls’ school two or more days after the boys have closed?

 

The “Ghost” nickname came out of his uncanny ability to catch students who had sneaked from school.

 

But the most enduring nickname of all was “Dad”. Many understood that his disciplinarian side was meant to bring the best out of them. Many found him fatherly in the manner in which he handled girls who became pregnant: He reserved their space in class on condition that they went home to deliver and not to abort.

 

Many identified with his style of leadership, where he and his wife were literally on duty from early morning till late at night; the wife going as far as preparing snacks for students on outings and tasting meals in the kitchen before students were served. When a student fell ill, their daughter Paloma says, it was Mr Gomes who was often the ambulance driver and his wife Annie the nurse as they headed to hospital. This, definitely, was dad.

 

That explains why, when Mr Gomes retired as the head of Moi Equator in 1992, the girls in the school staged a protest.

 

 

The ex-teacher’s eldest child, Desiree Gomes, remembers that day: “Six hundred girls got up and blocked the road, and they were holding mum and dad so tight so they wouldn’t leave… They went to the DC’s office demanding that ‘Mwalimu’ and ‘Mama’ had to come back to the school.”

 

But their time at the school, which Mr Gomes had headed for 20 years, was up and he was headed for retirement. And in his retirement, the name “Mwalimu” has taken prominence.

 

He taught some of Kenya’s most prominent people, including Equity Bank founder Peter Munga at Gaichanjiru High School in Murang’a County; former Cabinet minister Martha Karua at Kiburia Girls in Kirinyaga County and senior counsel Waweru Gatonye at St Mary’s Karumandi Secondary School in Kirinyaga County.

 

We are having an interview with Mr Gomes, 86, a few weeks after he was given the Order of the Grand Warrior of Kenya (OGW) award by President Uhuru Kenyatta for “distinguished and outstanding services rendered to the nation in various capacities and responsibilities”.


Mr Gomes was among the 56 Kenyans who received the OGW honours during last month’s Jamhuri Day. He believes the recognition is among the rewards he was promised by the former bishop of Nyeri when he asked about getting retirement benefits for his work.

 



Retired teacher John Gomes (in pink tie) with students at Gaichanjiru High School in 2018. In the background is the dormitory named after him at the school.
 

Pool

 

“When (nearing retirement), I went to the bishop and I said, ‘I am finishing my work. Do I get any benefits for my work?’ He put his hand around my head and said, ‘My dear son, you’ll get that reward in heaven,’” recalls Mr Gomes.

 

“So, these are the rewards I get now based on that prediction. I am so happy that this happened. I didn’t ask for it (the OGW award) but I got it because of my hard work,” he adds.

 

He was born to a family of staunch Catholics in Goa, the former Portuguese colony in western India, on May 17, 1934. As a young boy in an area that has St Francis Xavier as its patron saint, it was almost natural for him to take church responsibilities early.

Altar boy

“Our church is very near to us, and, in fact I was an altar boy for many years. That’s where I learnt how to drink a little wine. If the priest left a little wine, that was mine afterwards,” he jokes.

 

“So, whenever there was an elderly priest, we used to enjoy serving him because he used to put only half the wine in his chalice; so every time an elderly priest came I was very happy.”

 

He got his undergraduate degree at the University of Bombay in India, where he studied biology.

 

He aligned himself with the Consolata order of the Catholic Church and became a lay Consolata missionary teacher after university. His missionary work saw him go to Aden in Yemen in 1956.

 

“I went to teach in a Catholic school in Aden. There, I met a Consolata father who was coming from Italy to Kenya. He said, ‘Mr Gomes, please come to Kenya to teach over there as a missionary.’ So, he sent me the work permit and I came to Kenya in December 1959,” recalls Mr Gomes.

 

From then to date, he has been in Kenya. Unlike priests, lay missionaries are allowed to marry.

 

“But one wife,” he is quick to note.

 

“And then you carry on your work as a lay missionary, teaching anywhere. But then you know the salaries are not that excellent. That is the sacrifice you make,” he adds.

Mr Gomes’s first teacher posting in Kenya was at Mugoiri Girls in Murang’a County. That was in 1960 when roads were so poor that it was not uncommon for drivers to sleep in their stalled cars. This was also at the height of the State of Emergency, a period when the colonial government was out to crush armed rebellion to its rule.

 

“I had to learn a little bit of Kikuyu because that was Mau Mau time. So, I had to tell them in Kikuyu that I was going to a particular school, and they would push me right up to the school,” recalls Mr Gomes. “The roads were so bad that sometimes we used to sleep in the car at night. I used to keep a packet of milk all the time.”

 

He spent two years at Mugoiri and was then transferred to Karima Boys, where he spent a year, before being moved to Gaichanjiru Secondary, where he taught Mr Munga biology.

 

“He was a very intelligent person,” Mr Gomes says of Mr Munga.

From there, he was posted to Nyeri High School.

 

“Nyeri High was one of the top three schools at that time. And it was run by the American brothers. To teach in Nyeri High, you really had to be a good teacher because all the boys were above average. So, if you did well at the school, you were always likely to be promoted as a headmaster anywhere,” he says.

Disciplined lady

And true to that pattern, after Nyeri High his next posting was St Mary’s Karumandi as a headteacher. His next stop was to head Kiburia Girls, where Ms Karua was a Form Three student.

 

“She was a very disciplined lady. We made her prefect in Form Three,” he says of Ms Karua. “She is one of those who advised me to get a music set so that the girls could be kept busy (during weekends).”

In those days, he says, strikes were rampant and he had found being idle on weekends was one of the causes. Having dances in school was his way of keeping schoolgirls entertained on weekends to sap any negative energies.

 

From Kiburia, he was posted to Moi Equator in 1972, and that is where he would stay until his retirement. When he took over the school, he says, it had only two classrooms with 43 girls: 23 in Form One and 20 in Form Two.

 

It was not even known as Moi Equator; it was just Equator Girls. It was not until Mr Gomes and the school leadership invited the then Vice President Daniel arap Moi for a fundraiser that the “Moi” name came in.

 

Moi was pleasantly surprised when, as he went to open the administration block whose construction he had contributed towards, he found that the institution had been named “Moi Equator”.

 

“He was grateful that we had named it ‘Moi Equator’ when he was the vice-president. That was the first school named after him,” says Mr Gomes.

 

Starting out with just two buildings, Mr Gomes left Moi Equator when it had around 600 students, 12 classrooms, five laboratories, three dormitories, seven staff houses, a library, an administration block and a dining hall. He says Moi contributed to this growth through fundraisers.

 

“Plus, I started a farm with 1,000 chickens, 27 cattle, 80 pigs, 70 goats, 60 sheep,” he says. The farm, however, did not last long after he left the institution.

 

At Moi Equator, his family was part of the school. His wife, a professional stenographer, often helped in a number of roles and sometimes chipped in at-home science classes.

Their daughters say they were raised as part of the school family. Mother, father and children attended school dances with the girls. They also helped on the school farm with other students.

 

“My wife was their caterer, caretaker, mentor and nurse. She was a part of everything. So, it was a family affair that made the students feel that the school was part of their family. And that is why, even after 50 years, we still meet every year and cut a cake to celebrate,” says Mr Gomes.

 

Last born daughter

Besides the celebrations, the old girls of Moi Equator have been funding the John Gomes Foundation, which offers scholarships to bright but needy students.

 

“We can take two to three students at least every year,” says Desiree.

 

The foundation takes most of Mr Gomes’s time, besides the activities of the Earth Angels Welfare (Kenya) which is mostly run by his lastborn daughter, Paloma. The team works with Mother Teresa homes in Kenya as well as 15 homes and schools for orphaned, underprivileged, physically and mentally challenged, abandoned, HIV-positive and those living with albinoism.

 

“In retirement, I am spending all my time helping the less fortunate; sometimes joining my daughters in their work with Mother Teresa Earth Angels,” Mr Gomes says.

 

In recognition of his work, the dining hall at Moi Equator is named after Mr Gomes. There is also a dormitory at Gaichanjiru Boys built by Mr Munga that is named after him.

 

“I was shocked and surprised that that dormitory was named after me,” Mr Gomes says.

Mr Gomes has some interesting philosophies from his days as a teacher, key among them that a school head should always be in school during weekends.

 

“The most important thing for any studies to be done is discipline. Discipline is missing in the schools. Today, there is no discipline at all,” he says. “And if you want discipline, the head of the institution must be in the school compound during the weekend. It doesn’t happen.”

 

He also notes that school heads should cut middlemen in school procurement to avoid paying too much for goods they could have obtained by themselves.

 

“I saved money because I did (most projects) myself: Supervising, building. Now we have contractors, we have suppliers, we have so many people who collect so much cash and the schools cannot build anything at all. If a school has to improve, discipline comes from the top,” he says.

 

Mr Gomes also believes that food eaten by students needs to be properly checked by a person no less than the school head.

 

eondieki@ke.nationmedia.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


RIEP Carlito Mascarenhas

    CARLOS (CARLITO) MASCARENHAS   MAY 24, 1937 - JULY 16, 2024 Carlito pictured between the two Sikhs at the top It is with a sad heart and...