Bridgey's Story Bridgemohan, Sushma [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: I was born and raised in Trinidad. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: My dad didn't finish high school and he could read and write and I remember one of the earliest things that I remember about him is that he would get up really early in the morning, we had a lot of land, and he would go the land and do what he had to do and come back and read the newspaper from cover to cover in the hammock. He loved to read. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: He didn't finish high school because he was one of twenty-one and growing up the culture was that the oldest takes care of the youngest. So he and his older siblings left school and they got jobs and they started contributing to the household. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: My mom was one of fourteen and in her family everyone kind of went into teaching at one point. My aunt who opened up her own preschool, my mom was in primary school, and I had an aunt who was in secondary school and my uncle went into trade and they were teaching a trade school. My grandmother had to support this young family of twelve because my grandfather died in his early thirties; so she would teach everyone how to sew. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: Our education system was based on the Verger System. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: My first school that I went to - I went to two primary schools - the first one was about a fifteen minute walk from my house. Everyone in the village went there, my brothers, cousins, half of the village was family anyway so it's just like an extension and my mom was a teacher there. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: The first year of primary school was called first year, you were five, and then you were a second year and you were six, and then you went in standards of one, two, three, four, and five. When you got into standard three that's when the pressure started. There was a subtle change because then everyone started talking about lessons and you would start up with either having lessons after school and then standard four everything would then kind of revolve around school and then just doing more lessons. In standard five forget it, you didn't have a life, there was all this getting ready for when common entrance was. I ended up passing from my first choice because you had up to four choices of school. It wasn't based on location, it was based on which way you wanted to go to school. So my high school was an hour away from where I lived. So I passed from my first choice which was a Catholic all-girls school, St. Joseph's Convent St. Fernando. [Music Plays] >>SUSHMA: A lot of what I read after common entrance and before the high school transition period was a lot of Enid Blyton books and "Famous Five" and I read "The Diary of Anne Frank" and I think it was my second year of high school where I was introduced to V.C. Andrews and got into a lot of trouble for that because that was not type of books that should be brought into convent. [Laughing] Then again, at the end of high school we had to take a bunch of exams again on all levels. We're always getting ready for big, high-stakes exams. [Music Plays]