At twelve years old Mark Knight became cognisant of what he calls "a callous attitude of the government and the people toward the education of their youth". Education was important to the youngster and he questioned his and the country's future.

Mark Knight

Those were turbulent times, for in the early 1980s Jamaica was caught in the throes of terrible political warfare. The effect it had on the young Knight was to cement his resolve to learn and achieve, something he thought impossible in Jamaica, so he begged his father to take him and his brother overseas.

Last week, 19 years after his last visit and 24 years after he left, he returned to the island to marry Maria 'Jett' Capistrano, a Phillipine national.

He is now Dr Mark Knight, general surgeon, plastic surgeon and Lieutenant Commander, United States Naval and Marine Corps.

In fact, for his wedding at Sandals Royal Caribbean, Knight was elegantly decked in his US marine uniform. He gained his medical degree from the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania. And in 2003, he was selected by Dunn and Bradstreet and listed in National Register's Who's Who In Executives and Professionals.

But life was never easy for Knight. He knows well the bitter taste of poverty, he says, and when his parents divorced in 1977, it became even more difficult.

"We had to be constantly moving from home to home," he says. Apart from Berrydale district in Portland, where he was born, Duhaney Park, Claremont, Sherwood Forest, Stony Hill, Ensom City are some of the places that the young Knight called home. "We would have to move for a number of reasons."

Knight feels his life story is an apt motivator for Jamaican youngsters. He has experienced what it is to be without shoes; not to be able to pay for exams; to have every material possession destroyed, and to rebound.

He says he has an attitude of listening and learning, which served him well during his schooling. "I realised that a teacher could only coach and encourage, it was my responsibility to teach myself.

My seventh grade math teacher, Miss Williams, understood my desire to learn and my inability to pay for the high school entrance examination classes. She decided to tutor me, and paid the examination fee. The hours I spent with her led me to a new understanding of and respect for teachers."

With a scholarship to Ferncourt High School, Knight started his short schooling in Jamaica.

He subsequently went to live with his father and transferred to St Jago High and it was there that a series of events eventually led to his migration to the United States.

"I missed half of school that entire year. Part had to do with my safety, the other part was that teachers did not show up, sometimes," he says.

"I watched in consternation the growing unrest among the people. The tide of political violence that swept over the nation escalated to a fever pitch in May 1982, in anticipation of the October elections. St Jago High School was tear-gassed with school in session during one such foray.

"Even the teachers went on strike, demanded wage increases, and boycotted classes!"

However, there was hope for Knight overseas, for his father had migrated and in September 1982, he and his brother were accepted at Midwood High School, Brooklyn, New York.
"The next two years I would spend at Midwood were years of excellent academic achievement. Gifted in the arts and literature, I enrolled in journalism in order to write for the school's newspaper."

While taking classes such as Haematology he developed his interest in medicine. "In my senior year, I was honoured by being listed in Who's Who among American High School Students."

After graduating, Knight worked as a security guard, earning minimum wage at LaGuardia Airport in Queens. "I had no social security number, so my father simply gave one to me," he says.

Knight's preparations for admission to college were derailed after a fire totally destroyed his apartment in April 1987.
"I came home to find my apartment and equipment engulfed in flames.

The apartment and its contents were totally destroyed by a fire caused by a short in our electric stove. We had no insurance. We were wiped out. Fire Disaster Victims #142738, Red Cross Files."

"I had nothing left except the fragments of a shattered dream. I had no green card, no money, a bogus social security number and no job. With the proof available, I submitted my application to college." His father was unable to assist this time around, as he too had to be "fending off creditors while living in a welfare hotel".

Totally devastated, Knight says one James Nobles persuaded the admissions committee at State University of New York, and he was accepted.

The death of four close friends, including his roommate at college, during the summer of 1989 proved an epiphany for Knight. "Our true worth as human beings is reflected in the legacy we leave behind," he says, and thus college became even more serious.

"The following years were marked by significant accomplishments," he says.

"My academic achievements led most people to assume that I studied all the time, but this was far from true. In reality, I had learned to push myself to the extreme and function on minimal sleep. A good night's rest was four hours, and some nights I did not sleep at all. For two years I slept every other night in order to keep up with work and school."

And to help finance his way, Knight did not discriminate in his choice of jobs. He was a garbage man on campus.

"Initially, my work detail was to take the garbage from the dorm buildings. Eventually, I became a supervisor, managing a staff of 18. It was a humbling yet enlightening experience."
"With a job like that, it was easy to identify your true friends," he quips.

Eventually he graduated from Stony Brook with a double major in Biochemistry (winning the Ford Foundation Prize) and Honours in Chemistry, the first person in the history of the University, he says, to accomplish all of this.

His accolades include: The Undergraduate Excellence Award, The Ford Foundation Prize in Biochemistry, The SAINTS Founders Award, and The Lloyd E Sargeant Scholarship.

He was inducted into the Sigma Beta Honour Society, the Golden Key National Honour Society, and Phi Lambda Upsilon, the National Honorary Chemical Society, which had many Nobel Prize winners among its members. "I tutored organic chemistry, while performing part-time research in Organometallic Chemistry. Simultaneously, I was a teaching assistant for Macroeconomics."

At med school the "harsh bite of reality" reminded Knight that he was neither as wealthy nor as privileged as his colleagues. "I had walked into the University of Pennsylvania with $38 in my pocket. From then on, I would often joke that I was the poorest person I knew at Penn."

Knight's return to Jamaica could now be another chapter in his eventful life.

"Every time I read the papers, or catch up on the island gossip, my heart breaks. Like many other 'ex-pats' I feel the guilt of knowing that this situation reflects the mass exodus, the "brain-drain" starting in the 70s which depleted the island's intellectual resources."

So Knight yearns to use his expertise, in some fashion, to benefit the island, although he has not yet said how.
"It weighs heavily on my mind, that I have done so much for a land that is not my own," he laments.

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