She’s got a way about her

Merlgrove High School is not generally recogniSed as having a strong sporting tradition, but how the girls in blue must have cheered themselves hoarse when in 1989 Shalette Ashman won both the 800 and 1500m at the ISSA, Zone Six Champion at the National Stadium. How they must have boasted about having the most enduring athlete in that zone.

She could have considered a future in athletics, but the needs at home were so pressing that she had to earn an income immediately after graduation, so the spikes were given away and she got a Government job. Now Shalette looks back at her track training and says, “Sports gave me discipline. I cried every time I lost, not because I grudged the winner, but because I think if I had worked harder I could have won”. She took that discipline into building a career as a trainer in computing and to run a successful business. Today, she is a trainer consultant with the Management Institute for National Development (MIND) and runs her own school, Computer Training and More.

The Astroturf was not the first place that she cried because she lost. It had happened before in 1985 when despite her best efforts her name did not appear on the list of students who had been successful at the Common Entrance Examination. At that time, her mother hugged her and simply said, “You have to work harder”.

The failures that she has overcome have made Shalette soften towards others who have fallen short of their full potential. That is why she is a dedicated teacher who scored excellent passes between 1997 and 2000 in GCE Computer Studies, making her the most successful teacher in these subjects in the entire nation.

“I used to take students home with me and sometimes be with them until after ten O’clock at night, encouraging them. It is my way to give back.”

For the Ashmans, education was the way to overcome the desperate poverty under which they raised their children. They lived as a family unit, parents and five children, as one of several tenants in a yard on Grants Pen Road, not far from the offices of the Jamaica Observer. Shalette and her sisters and brothers grew up in the warmth of a neighbourhood where people cared for each other and looked out for each other’s children, but life was undeniably hard. On a typical school morning, ten-year-old Shalette would have to bathe under a standpipe in the yard because there was no running water in the house. The Ministry of Education school-feeding programme was a tremendous blessing because that is how the children got a nutritious lunch five days a week and some of the milk was surreptitiously stashed away to take home as well. At nights a kerosene lamp would light the table for homework even while the sound of the neighbours’ television sets and stereo systems wafted through the windows. The community was tight knit and safe until the general elections rolled around. In 1980 she remembers being very frightened, and she and her siblings would go under the bed to hide from the gunmen who ran through the yard at night.

“We knew that we were poor”, she remembers, “but my mother would say, ‘education is important, that is the way to change our situation. All you have to do is to learn'”.

Dignity was the hallmark in the Ashman home. Electricity wires crossed the sky over their house, but they did not take what they could not afford. Both parents worked hard to provide for the children. Mr Ashman washed cars five days a week at the Guinness plant and on weekends tilled the soil at his ‘grung’ in the Golden Spring hills. His wife worked as a domestic helper, and after sending the children off to the Grants Pen Pentecostal Church on a Sunday would deprive herself the pleasure of listening to a good sermon and toil beside him to raise the sugar cane, callaloo and fruits that they sold to make extra money.

After her second attempt at Common Entrance, Shalette was the first of her mother’s children to be placed at a secondary school of her choice, making the family proud. She stood tall in the pair of borrowed shoes on her graduation day from Constant Spring Primary School. Shortly after starting high school, life got even harder for Shalette and her family because her mother lost her job and never again found fulltime employment. From an early age, the children learned that they too had to do their part to earn for the household.

“In a way I actually preferred when my mother was not working because that meant she was at home and we could get dinner earlier. That experience taught us how to be self-reliant. On Saturdays we would walk and sell ginger beer in the Grants Pen Four Roads area and street market. The lady who owned our yard would buy charcoal from the truck and we sold it for her. There was a big zinc pan in the yard covered with zinc and people would come and buy a paint-pan of charcoal. On weekends we would sell sugar cane by the joint outside of ‘dances’ on Grants Pen Road. I was known for selling callaloo. I would walk with it in the box that chicken back comes in; sometimes I felt funny when I saw my classmates, but after that I felt good because they would buy from me and I used to enjoy what I was doing; I put life into it. I enjoyed making money. That is what turned me on – the fact that I had some money to take home.”

It so happened that when she was 14 years old, a fortuitous situation enabled her mother to own a home in Stony Hill. Her parents were grateful to be able to provide a calmer environment for their family outside of the volatile community where Shalette and the others were born; but incredibly, life was harder than before. When they moved in, the house was unfinished and every spare cent had to go into making it livable.

“My mother used to make one chicken stretch for several days, but she always reminded us how fortunate we were and that there were many people who were far worse off than us.”

“My socio economic condition forced me to get an education to start making some money. I started working at age 17 and enrolled at UTECH. Within two years I had a diploma in Computing.”

With her mind open to new challenges, Shalette readily took up an opportunity in 1995 to teach computing part time at St Georges evening classes downtown; that was when she realised that she loved helping people to learn.

“By the time I turned 21, I was making good money as an insurance underwriter, but I realised that I had an affinity for helping people who are from a lower economic standard and who felt as if they had no hope. I realised that this is what I wanted to do and this is what I loved.”

So, Shalette resigned from that job and worked as an instructor with INFOSERV. She distinguished herself teaching in their high school programmes at Campion College and her alma mater Merlgrove High School where she got the first passes in Information technology from that. All that time she was instinctively looking for a business opportunity and one presented itself three years later.

Living in Stony Hill opened Shalette’s eyes to the business opportunities there and she negotiated with her bosses at Infoserv to give her a franchise in the town. In August 1998, she started her own business teaching information technology for CXC, application software courses, beginner classes for adults and a basic school programme for young children. By August 2001, her business had developed such a good reputation and was gaining most of its students from referrals, that she went solo as “Computer Training and More”, her ethos being to give back to her community and to help people, her scriptural guide, ” I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”. The four-year-old business employs nine part-time teachers and an administrator. Fully integrated into her community, she is also a member of the Kiwanis Club of Stony Hill, chairing the Youth Services Committee in 2001.

As a married woman in her 20s, Shalette looks forward to pursuing the traditional goals of motherhood and owning a home of her own; alongside the dream of having a school that would cater to achieving academic excellence from school children as well as providing remedial assistance to adults.

“I enjoy being an entrepreneur. I have applied to do my MBA and that should help me to run my business successfully, but one of the reasons why I am taking on added responsibilities is that I want to be able to teach at the bachelor’s level and perhaps higher later on.”

“My father died two years ago; I never saw him read anything, maybe he could not read, but I believe that he was a brilliant man. When we made grammatical errors, he corrected us and as poor as we were, we were never hungry. I want my school to be somewhere for people who messed up the first time. Where the helper can afford to send her child. If you can give this to these people you are changing their lives forever and giving them a world of difference.”