ONE?OF?the strongest advocates for a new investigation into the environmental issues at the former Louis Lynch Secondary School has passed away.
Nigel Marshall, who was one of the first students to enter the school when it opened in 1978 and who also taught there for many years, succumbed to prostate cancer on June 7.
Marshall was so concerned about the number of cancer deaths among former teachers and students of the school, that he called last year for the contents of the environmental studies conducted on the school to be made public.
Four weeks ago, when the SUNDAY?SUN?commenced an investigation into the saga surrounding the school, Marshall, who was transferred from Louis Lynch to Queen’s College when the school was closed in 2007, once more called for the authorities to release the reports, during an interview with this newspaper at his St Michael home.
He spoke passionately about his life as a student, his involvement in the fight with other teachers to get something done about the environmental issues at the school and his concerns following what appeared to be a high rate of cancer deaths among former Louis Lynch students and teachers.
Marshall said from the first day he arrived, the school was affected by smoke from the neighbouring Pink Pelican Laundry.
“I?know for the first three years of my school life that gave us a fit; it would just belch soot all across the compound. . . . A lot of students would leave the classrooms and go outside where the hard court is now. We would have asthmatics getting really, really sick.”
Apart from white school shirts going a “shade down”, Marshall also recalled teachers such as Ben Craig and Miss Patrick complaining about the stains the soot left on their vehicles.
He said he was relieved when he returned to the school in 1991 as a teacher to find that the laundry had closed.
“Things were going relatively well after that,” he said. “There were no issues. But when Tropical Laundry opened, much to our displeasure, we had the same soot issues even though it was not as bad as earlier years.”
However, he said that by then teachers had had enough and they decided to take action.
“I remember Reginald Farley, who was a member of the staff, and some of the other teachers petitioned the Ministry of Education to do something and address the situation because they were not happy about it. They pushed for an environmental study and a few years after it was done by Oxley Associates, which found that there were contaminants in the air.”
Despite this discovery, Marshall said no action was taken and as teachers, they just got down to the task of teaching their charges.
“We felt our primary responsibility was to the children. We made a noise, got some level of notice and we just decided that we would wait for something to happen, but nothing really did happen.”
Yet, he said teachers continued to get sick.
“We were always complaining about feeling ill, especially feeling tired. A lot of us couldn’t make it through the day and we even joked about it. We would go home and hit the bed but the next day many of us were still exhausted.
“I?spoke to students and I?remember some of the girls had period issues, hormone imbalance issues. There was even a little girl who had a hormone cyst and we felt that this was a bit too early for issues like this in a young girl’s life. Asthmatics couldn’t cope. There was a teacher who would constantly complain about her skin being very irritated and another one who would lose her voice every day but say when she got home her voice would return.”
So fed up was one female teacher, he said, that she, as one of the union representatives, set about to get the laundry “to stop doing what they were doing”.
“What the laundry did was push the majority of work over the weekend. On Friday evenings you would see billows of smoke tailing going down across by the biscuit factory. But on Mondays when we came to school we would find layers of soot on the desks and teachers continued to get ill.
“At a teachers’ union meeting we decided to speak to our employer, the Ministry of Education, and tell them we were not happy with what was going on. There was the reading of the Employees Rights Bill so we were very aware of our rights and a strategy was put in place that we would speak to the Ministry and ask for the issue to be addressed. Barring that, we decided that we would take some measure of industrial action and agitate to have either the school or the laundry moved from the area because we recognised that people were having issues, not only with the smoke but the laundry had built a huge tank which kept Bunker C fluid, which was less than 20 feet away from the school wall and when they fuelled up you had this blast of oil which was as bad, or worse than, the soot.
The plan didn’t materialise as the teachers expected, Marshall said.
“When we went to the Ministry we were told why don’t you teachers go and do your SBAs (school-based assessments) – you’re always late with the SBAs. What laundry you’re talking about? That was the response and we were annoyed and angry and that was when we activated the union action.
“We went back to the Ministry formally and the attitude was they don’t know what is wrong with us teachers and the public fed into this. We decided that if we had any smoke or other issues we would just leave the school and that was what we did.
One afternoon, with the school enveloped in black smoke, Marshall said the teachers packed up and left.
“The students were like ‘wait teachers leaving and all of this smoke here we gone too’ and they left as well. This created a huge problem and the Ministry got involved and asked us what was going on. We refreshed their memories about the original study which Oxley had done and that was when we found out that there were actually problems and they did not do anything about it.
“By that time people from the Environmental Protection Department came in and people from the laundry came and told us that they would do their best not to create any problems for us. The Ministry asked us to go back to work and we did but one afternoon the same thing happened, and we went home again.”
This time around, Marshall said the Parent-Teacher Association got involved and accused the teachers of abandoning the children.
“I went to the PTA?meeting because my daughter was in first form and I spoke to them as a parent and I gave them a history of what was going on at the school. I told them that their children were in this too and we were not only fighting for our own quality of life but that of the children. They understood that and Rhonda Blackman, who was the President of the PTA, got onto it and the teachers and the PTA were moving together on this issue for once. We put more pressure on the Ministry and the media got involved so the Ministry had to do something.”
He also recalled the town hall meeting where Minister of Education Reginald Farley requested that they go back to school while announcing that a scientific study would be undertaken at the school.
However, while they complied their return to the school was short-lived.
“Mr Farley’s sister taught at the school for many years. I remember one day she fell ill and we had to rush her to the hospital and that was when the teachers decided to withhold their labour.”
Taking a leading role in this exercise, Marshall said they took a letter to the Labour Department “indicating that we were willing to work but something was wrong with the school which was affecting our health”.
“I led the teachers to the Ministry of Education and handed the letter to the Chief Education Officer, Wendy Griffith-Watson, and we told her that we had difficulties working at the school and we are here to see if she would reassign us.
“She went back to her office and we stayed there waiting. She came back out and told us that they didn’t have any place to send us. I told her ‘well we will return home and await where you will send us’.”
Even from their homes, Marshall said the teachers communicated with the students, sending them notes and speaking to them on the telephone.
A week after the encounter with Griffith-Watson, the Congress of Trade Unions and Staff Associations of Barbados got involved and eventually the school was closed following the results of two environmental studies.
As to those reports, Marshall said that, apart from the snippets carried in the media, the contents were never revealed to the teachers.
“The union was waiting on the result of the study to fuel a class action suit and there were parents who were also waiting on the results of the study to fuel their own cause. There are people who know exactly what was in the study, exactly what the results were but we (teachers)?never received the reports…”
In reference to his own illness, Marshall explained that three years ago he underwent surgery to have his thyroid removed and was given a clean bill of health by his doctors.
“The operation was successful there was absolutely no cancer found in the thyroid … A year later I?developed a bladder infection and on investigation my PSA (prostate-specific antigen) was over 100 and my doctor told me immediately that it was prostate cancer and it would have to be pretty advanced for it to be up in the hundreds.
“I?had some tests and it revealed that I had advance prostate cancer; it had spread outside of the prostate. I?had stage five prostate cancer, which is very bad. There is no cure at this stage; it is a matter of control.
Taking a deep breath, he added:?“Cancer does not run in my family. It is not a feature and I don’t know how to deal with it because there is nobody in my family who can give me advice. I am not a smoker, not a drinker, not a drug user. I even go to sleep early. My lifestyle has been average to good so where would this have come from?
“The doctors are baffled as to how I would have gotten it but everybody who has been ill, who went to Louis Lynch, their illness behaves very strangely. It is quick moving and it is aggressive.
Marshall expressed the belief that only the contents of the study could inform former teachers and students about what was possibly taking place with their health.
“I?think that the study has the key to what is going on with people. A lot of us are walking time bombs. My bomb went off but it may be possible to diffuse and to mitigate certain things with a lot of other people but they just don’t know,” he said.
In terms of critics who say there was no scientific proof to link the illnesses with any condition at the school, Marshall remained adamant that there was proof.
“The proof is in the study,” he charged. “The study would say what was present and what are the potentialities of the chemicals so you would know how to prepare and protect yourself.
“I have come to the conclusion that my prostate disease would have been in my body probably from my 30s to have gone to the level that it has,” he asserted, as he expressed disappointment with how the matter has been handled so far.
“We are government employees. We are humans. We are Barbadians and I think if you do a study that is going to help me, warn me, I have a right to that information.”
He added that the deaths and sicknesses could not be coincidental.
“It would have to be the world’s most glaring set of coincidences that you have so many people, having such rare forms of a disease, at such early ages with such similarities and the only commonality within this is that they all went to Louis Lynch Secondary School.”
Editor’s Note: This interview with Nigel Marshall was conducted four weeks ago. He passed away last Saturday but his family gave permission for the interview to be published saying it would have been his wish.