Mrs Grace de Souza A Remarkable Life: Nurse, Wife and Mother
>From Close Up- Herald Mirror, June 6, 1993 By Pamela D’Mello What do you do if you suddenly become the First Lady of the State? Well, if you are Grace de Souza, and wife of new Goa Chief Minister, the surgeon-politician, Dr Wilfred de Souza --- you “don’t let it affect you”, and carry on life as normal. Normal translates into pursuing interests ranging from tapestries to gardening and looking after a pet dog called Moshe Dayan. For the Goa Chief Minister’s wife, being in that position also implies a loss of much-valued privacy. “And sometimes I tease him about needing to make an appointment with him”. Success, to this modest and warm Englishwoman, is simply doing what one does best in life. And she doesn’t hide the fact that she’d have liked her husband not to have been in politics!!! “I have never liked my husband being in politics. He’s a good surgeon, a clean surgeon and he’s had a good training. I feel sorry that one should give up what one has worked for, all one’s life”, she says candidly, speaking her mind. So how she deal with her new role? Grace de Souza copes with being the Chief Minister’s wife by simply staying away from it all. By keeping away from the public eye. “I don’t even like parties”, she adds, referring to the many public engagements that go with her husband’s new job. She’s reticent about consenting to interviews, taking a ‘why-would-people-be-interested-in- me?’ position. Luckily, we were the exception. The pressures of being the wife of a high profile, news-making politician, does impinge on one’s life, she admits. “I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy”, she adds half serious. Grace de Souza though, has strong views on nursing, the profession she trained and served at. She is concerned about the new policy of permitting students to enter nursing courses only after a Class 12 Science course. This, she opines could definitely block the right sort of people from entering the profession, she argues. One does not need mere academic qualifications to become a nurse --- so much as one needs “a heart, where a heart should be,” she tells you. “You may be brilliant academically and yet still lack the human touch,” she says matter-of-factly. In India, nursing is still looked down upon as a profession. In the United Kingdom, where Grace de Souza trained and served, nurses are among the lowest paid. But, she believes, it should be that way, so that only the really committed enter the profession. Nursing is how she met her husband Dr Wilfred de Souza. Goa’s current Chief Minister met his wife in 1959, when he was Senior Orthopaedic Registrar at the Peterborough Memorial, near Cambridge country, and she, a third year nursing student. “A lot of nurses marry doctors”, she points out. In April of 1962, they married in Essex and left for India, the following year --- arriving first in Bombay and then going on to Calcutta. Grace’s surgeon husband was later posted to Goa --- then just emerging out of colonial rule. Of course, the posting was happily accepted --- it being Dr Willy’s (as he is known in Goa) home ground. The posting was part of a government plan to build up a “scientific pool” in India, by bringing back professionally qualified Indians from the first world, she adds. India, as also Goa, in the immediate post-Liberation days, was a new experience for the young Grace de Souza. “I must have been either mad or very brave”, she smiles as she reminisces. Home, children and family are extremely important spheres for Grace de Souza. But, she did work awhile at nursing at the Cosme Mathias Menezes Hospital in Panjim’s Altinho locality. She then chose to stop nursing --- finding the demands of being both, a good mum and a good nurse, simply too much to manage. “It’s too late to go back to nursing now. I’m over the hill”, she says with a touch of self-depreciating humour. For her, there’s a lot she can do when she finds a free moment. “I could pass time anywhere with a needle”, she says, telling you about her love for embroidery, knitting, crochet, sewing and especially tapestries. Four of her creations --- large tapestries in frames adorn the minimalist and elegant de Souza drawing room in their white single-storey Saligao home. What was it like when she first came to live in Goa, we ask? Goa in the 1960s was “quiet and beautiful”, even is quite underdeveloped and primitive --- with village dirt tracks and very little electricity, says Mrs de Souza. Now it’s bursting at the seams, she rues, adding that one simply can’t stop progress, or what goes on in the name of progress! In her view, the “rapid growth is just too much. It’s spoiling the place. Goa used to be clean…. Panjim is a madhouse…” she opines. How does she feel about politics? Grace de Souza’s views on politics tallied with her husband’s, especially over the Opinion Poll. “That was something to fight for. You had to fight! That, I did support. But after that…?” “In politics, you don’t make friends. Only enemies”, says Mrs de Souza, making her distaste for the world of politics clear. For herself, she “loves to see things grow” as her well-kept, colourful garden attest to. While she likes gardening and dogs, Dr Willy only “tolerates” dogs, including their Dalmatian Moshe Dayan, who has a black spot over one eye and gets his name from a former deceased Israeli defence minister who wore a black eye patch over a damaged eye. Grace de Souza’s contributions were and are not contained to home and hearth however. As the unofficial correspondent for British nationals in Goa, there’s a lot of work to be done. That involves co-ordinating aid and assistance, in case of deaths, hospitalisations, or arrests of Briton nationals visiting this tourist state. During the anti-war, anti-industrial-strait-jacket, “flower” movement of the late 1960s and 1970s, when droves of western hippies chose to live alternate, spiritual, back-to-nature lifestyles, in Goa --- Mrs de Souza was required to help a great many of them. Young people, who gravitated to the hippie movement, came from two diverse sets of backgrounds, she suggests. In her opinion, some may have come from troubled families, others from wealthy ones, where parental attention may have been in deficit. She certainly did not mind the considerable time she had to give to that activity, adding that it gave her great satisfaction, she learnt a lot and gained rich life experience from the work. Nudge her to talk about her life with Dr Willy, and she says her husband of 31 years is “very patient, very calm in emergencies, a very caring husband and a caring dad to the girls.” But, she also concedes, her husband might just be a bit too outspoken for local liking. (ends) -- Pamela D'Mello https://goajournal.in/ https://muckrack.com/pamela-dmello-1317087 http://pameladmello.wordpress.com