Roots, Resilience and Becoming

I have spent much of my life helping people and organisations tell their stories. Then I wrote the eulogies for my brother Nicky, my father and my mother—a responsibility I took on partly because of our fractured family history. In doing so, I came to understand how easily a life can be reduced to a few dates, positions and public achievements.

No one else carries every part of my story or fully understands what some of those experiences meant to me. I have therefore chosen to preserve part of that story in my own words—not as an ending, but as a living record of the experiences that shaped my resilience, my love of learning and my commitment to service.

A Caribbean inheritance

My Caribbean identity reaches across St Lucia, Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. My maternal grandmother, Marguerite Tobierre-Willie, was from Micoud, St Lucia. Her children were also born in St Lucia before the family moved to Barbados in the 1950s.

When I was about four years old, my mother experienced a serious mental health crisis. She took the three of us—my older brother Nicky (Dominique), my baby brother Edward and me—to Barbados, separating us from our father in Trinidad. We lived with our grandmother and our maternal uncle Alfred. In later years, Alfred’s wife, Loretta, also became an important part of our upbringing. Together, they worked to keep the three of us on the right path.

We first lived near Brandons Beach and later moved to Atlantic Shores in Christ Church. We returned to Trinidad when I was 12, and I have remained here since. My brothers eventually went back to Barbados, where they later died. Barbados became my foundation, shaping some of my earliest ideas about learning, community, family and belonging.

Growing up quickly

One of my clearest early memories occurred near the shoreline soon after we arrived in Barbados. A strong wave swept me farther out to sea. I remember struggling, calling for my mother and seeing her remain still on the beach. I also remember going beneath the water and looking up at the sun through it. As I looked upward, my fear gave way to a profound peace—one I have never experienced in quite the same way since. My next clear memory was waking at home the following day. I was later told that I had nearly drowned and that one of our neighbours had pulled me to safety.

As a child, I could not understand why my mother had seemed unable to respond. The experience created an emotional distance between us. Only much later did I understand that her stillness came from her breakdown—not from an absence of love. That understanding did not erase the memory, but it allowed me to see both the child I had been and my mother with greater compassion. Sadly, the distance between us was never repaired.

At that age, I blamed myself for her condition. I believed that if I could be the best at school—and the best at everything else—perhaps she would get better. It was a burden no four-year-old should carry, but it became the beginning of a drive to excel that has never left me.

I experienced depression as a child. Yet I do not look back on that period only as difficulty. It shaped me, strengthened me and required me to develop resilience very early. I learnt that strength does not mean denying what happened. It means recognising what we survived and deciding what we will build from it. I return to that understanding whenever life becomes especially difficult. Rather than seeing hardship simply as something to endure, I try to ask what it is preparing me for—and how I can emerge from it stronger, wiser and better able to meet what comes next.

The image of sunlight filtering through the water has stayed with me. It often comes back to me when I enter deep meditation. Yoga became part of my life at the age of nine. Although I have not practised continuously, its disciplines of breath, stillness and inward attention have remained a foundation.

Remember everything

The photograph at the top of this page was taken by my father when I was four years old and preparing to attend St Angela’s/Ursuline Convent School. During one of his visits from Trinidad, the nuns told him that I cried for hours every day because I missed him. They were worried about me.

I remember him asking me about the crying and telling me that I could not allow it to affect my schoolwork. Then he said, “Remember, you were born on Remembrance Day. You have to remember everything.” I took him literally. For many years, my powers of recall were exceptional. It was only as a teenager that I discovered Remembrance Day did not mean that I was personally required to remember everything.

The story still makes me smile, but his words stayed with me. Memory became a way of preserving people, places and experiences that might otherwise have disappeared.

Courage, protection and Nicky

During those early school years in Barbados, Nicky and I also attended Merrivale Preparatory School. I cannot now say with certainty whether this was before or after my time at St Angela’s/Ursuline Convent School, but it was at Merrivale that we encountered older school bullies. They used racist terms that neither of us understood; we had only recently arrived in Barbados. We did, however, understand that we were being mistreated.

We stood up to them, and the incident eventually led to the bullies being suspended. It became one of my earliest memories of the closeness between Nicky and me and our shared willingness to defend ourselves and each other.

On the night I learnt that Nicky had died in 2023, I eventually fell asleep and dreamt twice about that childhood encounter. I had not thought of it in many years. To me, the recurring dream felt like the only way my older brother could still pass a final message to his younger sister—a reminder of the courage we had shared: never stop being that person. Never stop standing up for yourself, for others and for what is right.

Learning, love and the life I built

The need to excel that began in childhood matured into a love of learning for its own sake. Education, for me, has never been only a route to a better job. It is a form of personal growth—a way of remaining curious, expanding one’s world and refusing to become fixed.

In 1998, I formed KAMO Designs & Productions Limited with my business partner, Stephen Wong Kang. Before taking that step, Stephen and I had both worked at an internationally affiliated advertising agency.

Communication became both my profession and one of the ways I made sense of the world. I came to believe that communication is not decoration; it is a responsibility. It can make complicated ideas understandable, ensure that people are represented fairly and help worthwhile work reach those it is meant to serve.

I met Ken in 2003, and we married in 2010. He has been extraordinarily supportive of my work, studies, service and many pursuits, giving me the freedom to follow new ideas, accept demanding leadership responsibilities and return to university.

That support has always flowed in both directions. I urged Ken to pursue a second undergraduate degree and postgraduate studies, and now to look towards a PhD. For both of us, education has been about continuing to grow.

To me, love is more than sharing a home or travelling through life together. Love means believing in another person’s possibilities, encouraging them when the journey becomes difficult and helping each other become more than either might have become alone.

Turning resilience into service

My professional work, community service, research and conservation interests may look like separate parts of my life, but they share one foundation: a desire to clarify, protect, connect and create something useful for others.

As a Board Member of the Greater Tunapuna Chamber of Industry and Commerce, and as Executive Director of the Supermarket Association of Trinidad and Tobago, I saw that these roles were never about holding a position. They were about listening, connecting people and turning shared concerns into constructive action.

Rotary widened that instinct. Through the Rotary Club of St Augustine, and later District and regional responsibilities, I have worked to bring people together and help young people begin their own journeys of leadership. Of all of it, helping to charter the first EarlyAct Club in Trinidad and Tobago has meant the most to me, because I know how deeply childhood shapes the person we become.

The child who learnt early that circumstances can change without warning became an adult who values structure and follow-through. The child who stood beside her brother against bullies became a woman willing to speak when something is wrong. The child whose instinct was to protect became an advocate for animals, wildlife and conservation. And the child who believed learning could make things better never stopped studying.

Loss, reconnection and telling my story

My younger brother Edward died in 2009. My grandmother died in 2010, my uncle in 2013, Nicky in 2023, my father, Kenny, in February 2026 and my mother, Susan Willie-Mohammed, in September 2026. These losses changed the shape of my family and made the preservation of memory increasingly important to me.

Following my father’s death, an unexpected blessing emerged: I reconnected with cousins I had been separated from for about 40 years. That distance came from conflict between my parents and circumstances over which we, as children, had no control.

Just as I understood the recurring dream after Nicky’s death as a final message from him, I felt that reconnecting with my cousins was a gift from my father—his way of giving part of my family back to me, so that I would no longer feel disconnected from my blood family.

Another gift came six months after his death. My stepmother, Charlotte, told me that near the end of his life my father kept coming back to one of his favourite stories. My instinct to protect has always extended to animals, especially cats. When my mother’s Doberman once went for my kitten, I bit the dog. I had forgotten the incident.

My father had not. For him, the story captured the fearless child who was willing to confront something much larger than herself to protect what she loved. Through Charlotte, he returned that child to me. In different ways, Nicky and my father had each restored an early memory and left me with the same reminder: whatever the adversity, face it head-on. That fearless child is still part of me.

Writing their eulogies showed me how much can be lost when a family is fractured and the person who carries the memories is no longer there to explain them. That is why I am telling this story now.