The third of six children, and the first son, Herman Reid was born in Montego Bay, St. James to very humble parents, and spent the earlier years of his life growing up in St. Mary. Due to pastoral commitments, Herman’s dad migrated with the family to Portland in 1985 where they all reside to date.

Herman has been married to Lexia, the love of his life for over ten years and the union has produced a daughter, Lexania.

A graduate of Happy Grove High School, Herman Reid cherishes the many years he has spent at high school participating in track and field, and serving as a member of the 4H Club.  Armed with four CXC, and two GCE subjects, he entered the College of Agriculture, Science and Education (CASE) he pursued a Diploma in Primary Education, and a Bachelor’s degree in Physical Education. He also obtained a certificate in coaching cricket at the primary school level.

While at CASE Herman was involved in college activities as the first year representative on the Student Council, Deputy Vice-Present of the Student Council, the Chairman for the sport committee, member of the college band, and Vice-President and President of the Universities & College Christian Fellowship (UCCF). This outstanding sportsman has also contributed much time to local sports as a member of the National Sports Committee for Primary, All-Age and Junior High Schools from 2005 to the present.

He has also served as a member of the National Coaching Team which took the junior Jamaica team to the British Virgin Islands, participating in the 2008 Caribbean Union of Teachers Games. A Parish Sports Coordinator from 2005 to 2008, Herman has taken time to serve as head coach and founder for the Portland Juniors Track Team, and Head coach of the Ken Wright Cricket, Football and Track & Field Teams.

In the community at large, he has served as President of the Long Bay Police Youth Club, and a seventeen-year stint in leadership in the Portland District of the scout movement up to the rank of Assistant District Commissioner. Serving as a Director on the Gospel Expression Band, Herman has provided in excess of twenty years of leadership to various church groups.  

Herman Hervin Reid, the Portland GGAA Parish Committee salutes you and has named you the Award Recipient for the Governor-General’s Award of Excellence for the parish of Portland in the year 2009.                    

            

 

Adli Lewis, born in Portland, is a teacher at the Boston Primary and Infant School where he also serves as the Scout Leader. Adli has a passion for teaching and working closely with young people. He is a very active member of staff, Chairs the school’s fundraising committee, as well as Acts as Dance Co-ordinator for their festival participants who, through his guidance, won both bronze and gold medals in 2008.

 

A multi-talented individual, he is also the football coach and, at times, co-ordinates the                     Miss Boston Primary Beauty Competition.

 

Adli Lewis’ work in the community of Belle Castle also assists young persons, serving as President of the Belle Castle Youth Fellowship, a position he has held for the past seven years. He is also the Immediate Past President of the Portland Association of Baptist Youths. Scouting has benefitted from his voluntarism, and he currently serves as the East Portland District Commissioner for the Portland Scouts’ Association, where he is responsible for five Scout Packs and their leaders.

 

Adli Lewis is described as a dedicated and hardworking young man and this is shown by the many awards he received while a student at the College of Agriculture Science and Education (CASE). In 2006 he was the Douglas Samuels Memorial Scholarship recipient.  He was recognized as Student of the Year for 2008 and Top Student in the Faculty of Primary Education. He also received the Teaching Practice Award and the Technology in Education Award in 2008.

 

Adli Lewis, it is with pride and confidence that the members of the Governor-General’s Achievement Award Committee of Portland have selected you as a worthy recipient of the Governor-General’s Youth Award of Excellence for the parish of Portland, in the year 2009.

The Very Reverend Dr. Marion E. Sutton was born in Drapers District, Portland and was the third of six children. She attributes her determination and success to God and her dedicated parents who worked very hard to ensure that all their children were educated and taught good values from a very early age.

 

Driven by the experience and example of her parents, she was determined to achieve academic excellence. She displayed an early reading competence having been taught to read the Daily Gleaner by the age of three. This buttressed her educational development above her peers.

 

Her mother operated a grocery store, worked as a cook, made and sold coconut oil, as well as broke stones. Her father baked bread, did mixed farming and landscape gardening. Keen to seek a better life for the family, her parents along with an older sister migrated to the United States of America. Marion and her younger siblings were left with their grandmother to complete their primary and secondary education.

 

Dr. Sutton excelled at sports and academics, representing Titchfield High School in athletics, netball, and field hockey. Appointed prefect and headgirl at Titchfield in 1969, she successfully completed the General Certificate of Education (GCE, ‘A’ level), then joined her parents in the United States of America to pursue tertiary education.

 

Gaining a distinction in the Bachelor of Arts degree, National University, California, Dr. Sutton was class Valedictorian and received the prestigious Danforth Fellowship for graduate studies attending Columbia University, New York. Graduating with a doctorate in International Educational Development and a discipline in Social Anthropology in 1980, Dr. Sutton received a National Institute of Education post doctoral fellowship for advanced research in education at Yale University. In 2001, she also completed a Master of Divinity with Distinction at the Newman Theological College, Edmonton, Canada. After serving a number of churches in Canada, Jamaica beckoned her, and she has served as Rector of four churches, and Rural Dean of Portland, Diocese of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands (Anglican Church).

 

Dr. Sutton has used her knowledge and position in her community to assist many persons. She is the Co-ordinator for the Pastoral team that provides grief counseling to families, and more recently, families of the Rio Grande Valley Truck Tragedy. She serves as Chairman for the Board for the Cooper’s Hill Primary School and holds membership on the Mill Bank Community Centre and Upper Rio Grande Development Committee. Dr Sutton is also the founder and spiritual director of the Rio Grande United Women’s Association and the founder and Principal of the St Jude’s Bourbon Basic School. She is married to John Sutton and has four children, Michele, Nnenna, Georgina and, Susan.

 

The Very Reverend Dr. Marion Sutton it is with confidence that your colleagues and the members of the Governor-General’s Achievement Award Committee of Portland, proudly select you as a worthy recipient of the Governor-General’s Achievement Award for the parish of Portland in the year 2009.

Sygiosmund Morales Mayne is a tireless community worker whose contributions have benefited the lives of many young people and adults in the community of Boston, and the parish of Portland.

 

In 1990, he was instrumental in founding the Boston Old Students’ Association. Through the fund raising activities of the Association, members rebuilt the Boston Community Centre, and provided modern bathroom facilities for the old Boston Primary School. He also initiated the awarding of scholarships for students who were successful in the Common Entrance Examinations; and organised functions to recognise persons who contributed to the betterment of the community.

 

Mr. Mayne was born on March 26, 1939, in Castle, Portland; the third of seven children for Althus and Gretel Mayne, farmers in the Castle community. At age six, he lived with his aunt in Boston, where he attended Boston Elementary School; and despite financial difficulties, he was determined to excel.

 

He passed the First, Second and Third Jamaica Local Examinations; and subsequently migrated to England where he studied electronics. He later moved to the United States of America where he did an Associates Degree in Electronics at the RCA Institute of Technology in 1971.

 

On his return to Jamaica, in 1971, he worked with Transoceanic Communications Limited, until his retirement in 2005.

 

Mr. Mayne was instrumental in establishing the Castle Youth Club, to provide a context in which the young people in that community could play cricket and other sports. He also secured the assistance of the Seventh-day Adventist Church to equip the Centre with stoves and sewing machines; and special training sessions were held to teach culinary arts and woodwork.

 

Married to Herma since 1940, he has three children, one of whom is a doctor in the U.S.A. This ardent volunteer and community organiser, has recruited volunteers to build two additional classrooms at the new Boston Primary School, to house the Infant School Department. He has also been involved in the “Heart Beat of The World Project” at the Boston Community Centre where 50 young people were trained in agriculture, housekeeping, early childhood education and home economics.

 

Mr. Mayne currently serves as Chairman of the Board of Management for the Fair Prospect Primary School, a position he has held for many years; and he is actively seeking to acquire land to build a new Primary School in Fair Prospect.

 

Sygiosmund Morales Mayne, it is with pride and confidence that your colleagues and the members of the GGAA parish committee have selected you as a worthy recipient of the Governor-General’s Achievement Award for the parish of Portland in the year 2008.

Denroy Decardova Palmer, leader and founding member of the Manchioneal Community Development Committee, is a passionate community worker. Through this organization, he has spearheaded Citizens Associations in Barracks, Weybridge and Forth; and the Farmers Group, now affiliated to the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS)...

The sixth of seven children, Aileene Williams lost her father, Zephaniah Williams, when she was four years old, leaving her mother, Susan Williams, to raise seven children. Her mother supported the family by assisting other mothers as a cottage midwife, helping the sick, washing, milling coconut, breaking stones by the road side to sell to the Public Works Department, or whatever else she could do...

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Mrs. Pearletta Equilla Jarrett of the Parish of Portland, was born in Hope Bay in 1932, the sixth child of her father, a farmer and mother, a messenger at Hope Bay Post Office whom she helped deliver telegrams on Fridays...

At eight, many boys living in rural Jamaica are in their backyards flying kites and helping their fathers to rear livestock. A few live out their childhood in play games depicting adulthood, but never quite understanding it. Not Locksley Oliver Johnson.

Born on February 9, 1939 in Port Antonio, Portland to mother Hilda Estena, and father, David Walter, young Frank Barrington Lawrence shared his humble home with   ten brothers and five sisters. At an early age, his parents separated, and he moved to live with his mother and small brothers. His mother did odd jobs such as breaking stones, and husking coconut to provide for the family. ...

Johnathan Patrick Lamey was born in Alexandria, St. Ann on February 2, 1954, one of eleven children known for being very obedient and well mannered to his parents and teachers. He was a willing assistant to his parents, small farmers, who planted yam, corn and red peas and raised goats and a few rabbits. On many occasions when his siblings were unwilling to assist, he would be the one to go to ...

Sylvia McKenzie experienced very harsh and difficult times from her early youth, but she struggled through and survived to be described in her adulthood as a Jamaican woman who has not only achieved happiness and comfort for herself and her immediate family, but also for many of her relatives and persons from impoverished communities in Eastern Jamaica. For over thirty years, through her ...

Vincent Holgate is the first of eight children, whose parents had to endure the harsh economic struggles of rural Jamaica to support the family. He was born on September 18 1943, in the district of Prospect, Portland which at that time was plagued with violence and other social and economic problems. At age 9, he was sent to live with his paternal grandmother in the same area. He attended the ...

This gentleman of 59 years though born in Montego Bay has spent a large part of his life in the parish of Portland. His parents made their living from the higgler trade and from that income schooled all their 11 children. In order to assist with the family finances young Munroe assisted his parents when time permitted. He received his education at Barracks Infant School, Chetolah Park Primary and ...

Kenneth Bryan was born sixty seven years ago in Manchioneal, Portland. Orphaned at twelve years old, he lived with is aunt. He had to boil coconut oil to help maintain the family and at age ten he became an apprentice tailor, managing to sew his own trousers by the age of twelve, but because of small returns changed his skill to carpentry and also worked in Port Antonio on the Ferro Cement Boats. ...

James Patterson was born in 1934 in the Mount Peasant District of the Parish of Portland, the 11th of fourteen children of his father a cultivator and mother a higgler. He went barefoot to school at Mt. Pleasant and helped with chores at home and in the field, sometimes stopping from school to carry loads for the market. His elder sister bought him his first pair of canvas shoes because he was ...

Pearletta Jarrett was born in Hope Bay in 1932, the 6th of six children of her father a farmer and her mother a messenger at the Hope Bay Post Office. She had to stop from school on Fridays to help her mother deliver telegrams in the community as her two elder brothers and sister had left home. She also had to wash and iron her brother's clothes for him to attend school. Pearletta passed the ...

Percival Lynch was born in Marlie Hill, St. Catherine in 1957 the first of his mother's two children. He grew up without a father and was cared for by adopted grandparents, supported solely by his mother who did higglering, travelling 13“ miles by donkey to and from Old Harbour. Percival had to draw water 2“ miles on his head, cut grass for goats and cows and help with picking of coffee and ...

Hutton Oliver Lammie was born in June of 1943 in the district of Bourbon, Portland. He is the last child in a family of six children. He attended elementary schools in Maidstone and Coopers' Hill. In the mornings before school, it was mandatory that young Hutton attended to his chores which included moving the goats and cows as well as feeding the pigs. His parents were small farmers who could ...

Maureen Rose Campbell, born on August 22, 1959, attended the Bethesda Basic School before enrolling at the Port Antonio Primary and Secondary Schools. Her parents, Myrtle and Herman Campbell, a household helper and a mason respectively, taught young Maureen the virtues of punctuality, hard work and commitment.  Armed with this upbringing, inadequate resources did not prove to be an obstacle ...