PPE, checking in with Kadeem Hazell

Newsletter for October 2022

Delivering PPE to health care workers in Kingstown

Recently, and thanks to the help of donors, we were able to deliver another shipment of N95 masks to Milton Cato Hospital. The masks were sent by the Friends of the Grenadines Initiative, under the direction of Linda Sagan Harrier, to be used by medical staff and patients. In all we sent over 1000 masks for the hospital as well as 100 to the World Pediatric Project, for them to have on hand in their Kingstown clinic.

From left to right are: Andrew Williams, Milton Cato Hospital Deputy Hospital Administrator; Sr. Jasmine Samuel, Milton Cato Hospital Departmental Manager; and Sigmund Wiggins, World Pediatric Project SVG Program Director.

Life in Toronto

We recently checked in with Kadeem Hazell who has begun a degree at Toronto Metropolitan University, studying aeronautical engineering. As he says, "It's a big bite!"

By Glen Herbert

Most days Kadeem is up before dawn, at least these days and through the winter months when the sun is lower in the sky. He lives with extended family in North York, which isn’t all that far from Toronto Metropolitan University—formerly Ryerson University—where he’s enrolled in the aerospace engineering program. Still, on public transit in a large, busy, growing city, the commute to school takes about an hour there, and an hour back.

Kadeem has his first class at 8am each day excepting Tuesdays. “It’s a long day,” he says, an understandable touch of weariness in his voice. He typically gets up at 6 or 6:30, and he stays at school until the evening, finishing classes most days at 6pm and then doing work until the commute back home.

Toronto is the largest, busiest city in Canada, and he admits that he has mixed feelings about the bustle of it all. “The trains are full, the busses are full. But, it’s something you get used to.” He takes the subway each morning, getting out at Dundas Square. In Toronto, it really doesn’t get more downtown than that. “You get a lot of interesting characters around!” he says, knowing that’s probably an understatement.

Toronto Metropolitan University is one of the biggest post-secondary institutions in the country, and is in the very heart of Downtown Toronto.

What he’s doing, though, makes it all exceptionally worthwhile, and you can hear that in his voice, too. As we speak, he had just come out of his physics class. “It is like in real life,” he says. “You’re doing things that engineers would actually use. ... It’s just exposing you to more engineering topics, and more professionals working in the field. There are people in the aeronautical industry, you know, coming in for a chat. And it’s astonishing to hear what these people are doing.” He mentions a guest lecturer from Bombardier, a jet manufacturer, who spoke on product control. (Apparently Kadeem not only knows what product control is, but is also clearly jazzed by it.) “You know, Air Canada wants to move forward with hybrid airplanes, they want to get planes that are powered just by hydrogen,” moving away from a dependency on fossil fuels. “I think that’s where the world is headed.”

He’s studied at other schools, most recently Memorial University in New Brunswick, but “the difference with this school, is that it’s a lot more diverse,” he says. “This school has a lot of international students. A few of my friends are from India. And there’s one from Ukraine, so we do get to chat a lot, about the things that are happening in Ukraine. I asked him if it was new, what is happening, and he said what’s going on has been going on for a long time. But, yeah,” he adds, pausing, “that’s a different kind of discussion.”

Kadeem is taking four courses this semester while also working a part time job. With the work, doing five courses would be the maximum he could reasonably take at one time. In addition to physics, he’s taking chemistry, introduction to engineering, and linear algebra. “It is a big bite!” he says. “It takes some time management to get it done.”

His professors are as diverse as the student body. “My linear algebra prof, he’s Asian. Chemistry is an Indian teacher and physics is Canadian. They both have very interesting characteristics. Especially the chemistry teacher. He’s very vibrant, and he helps the class a lot. He really goes the extra mile. While, in other classes, the profs are very direct and straight to the point. You know, ‘Here it is. Get it done and get it done good.’”

This is Kadeem's first year of the five-year program. In his third year he’ll be working in industry, and he hopes to get a placement with Air Canada. “Because, as you know, I have a little passion for flying as well.” He has a passion for Bequia, and understandably misses home. He’s been in Canada for over a year now, in part because of the travel restrictions when he first came, and in part simply because of the demands of work and study. He’ll be home in December, returning for the Christmas holiday. Then he’ll be back in Toronto in early January. The snow will be back by then, too. He's not so jazzed about that.