Port Kaituma’s Jensen Samaroo is UWI St Augustine valedictorian
-studying law to honour grandma
Regaled by his maternal grandmother about the exploits of lawyers at the Matthews Ridge Magistrate Court, a young Jensen Samaroo was so intrigued not just by the stories but the obvious admiration she had for lawyers that he resolved in his heart to become a legal luminary she would be proud of.
His desire to become a lawyer was twofold though, as while he wanted his grandmother Ivy Dawson’ s admiration, he also heard stories of people who went unrepresented because they could not afford a lawyer and he wanted to be able to help. While his journey to fulfilling that dream is still ongoing, Samaroo, who grew up in Port Kaituma, recently scored a big victory that he is still savouring: valedictorian at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine Campus. He graduated with a first-class honours degree in political science with a minor in international relations, a programme he had initially seen as a stepping stone to him entering the law faculty.
“It is certainly an honour and a privilege to have been selected as the valedictorian. I must say, however, that it is something I did not intend by any means to achieve…,” Samaroo said during a recent virtual interview with Stabroek Weekend.
He recalled that when he enrolled in 2018, his intentions were to get through
the programme, immerse himself as much as possible in university life and be active in student leadership.
All of that was done and more and at the end of the three-year journey, Samaroo said he knew he was a strong candidate to become the valedictorian and as such his nomination was not a surprise. He initially intended to turn it down as the interviewing process would have clashed with his course schedule.
He was in Port Kaituma at the time on holiday and remembered having a conversation with a good friend, Chelsea James, whom he has known since nursery school. She encouraged him to go ahead and accept the nomination.
Samaroo did and he prepared the speech to be presented to the interview panel on the very day it was scheduled. The stimulus for the speech was ‘Dare to Be’ and he spoke of daring to be West Indian, which won over the panel and four days later he was informed he was selected. “For me that was a major accomplishment, because growing up in Port Kaituma I felt as though many things were excluded from me so over the years, not this alone, this, and many of the other accomplishments I had over the years, really has cemented for me the fact that almost anything that I want to achieve I can,” he said.
Often recount
Going back to his childhood days Samaroo recalled that his grandmother recounted to him and others certain court sessions she witnessed as she travelled there for different reasons. There were also some occasions when one of his uncles had brushes with the law and so his grandmother visited with him as well.
“When she would be recounting it I would be intrigued by it in two ways. One, the kind of admiration that she had for the work that the lawyers did with the cross examination and their eloquence and so on. I was very intrigued, I guess, by her admiration of them and my grandmother being someone very dear to me, I craved
that admiration in some way,” Samaroo said.
The second, was when she spoke of the many people who went unrepresented because of the high fees attorneys from Georgetown would charge. He knew many of the people who went unrepresented and developed the urge to address the situation by being able to help other such people in the future.
“That is what I am working towards… ,” he said, recalling that he spent his last primary school year with his grandmother as his parents had moved to the city. Among other things, she helped him to develop a love for reading as she had him reading the newspapers and recounting what he had read.
After primary school, Samaroo moved on to President’s College where he said he spent five “amazing years” years, before completing sixth form at the Bishops’ High School. It was at President’s College that he fell in love with Caribbean History and the use of the English Language. He described the years at Bishops as being a “transformative period” in his life, as it was there that his vision and passion for regional and Caribbean integration began.
He met like-minded persons and they formed the Bishops’ High School Law Society. He was one of the founders and every Friday they held sessions to discuss various topics: law, politics, economics and social affairs.
Samaroo said he had always wanted to attend the University of the West Indies, but the Mona Campus. However, a chance meeting with a Bishops’ alumna who was at St Augustine Campus saw him applying to both campuses. He was accepted at Mona to do law but when he looked at the two St Augustine was the more feasible financial option.
Even though his parents would have supported his Mona dream, he abandoned it because he knew it would have been a heavier burden for them.