Within this system students are expected to specialize very early. By grades 10 to 12, they want you to start looking like an engineer or a doctor. That was not for Minott, even though she could easily have become an engineer or a doctor. She could have followed many of her friends to the University of the West Indies when she graduated from high school. Rather than enroll, she took the year off after high school to apply to schools in the U.S., and kept herself busy teaching calculus in the high school from which she had just graduated.
Cricket is our thing.
Suzanne entered Middlebury the same age as her peersthe first time she'd ever been with her peer group. She had some adjustments to make. Snowball fights replaced playing dodgeball with guavas. And the informality of the United States confounded her. In Jamaica we are not on a first-name basis with our teachers.