In the same year that Enoch Powell was giving his “Rivers of Blood” speech in Britain, Father Eusebius was getting ready to inaugurate a British School in Dubai. He had managed through skilful diplomacy to convince the Ruling family to grant enough land for a Catholic Church and a small school. I have to believe that Father Eusebius was an honorary Goan at heart, for his contribution to the material and spiritual well-being of early Goans in Dubai cannot be measured. He had a deep fondness for us. His entire staff from the Choir master, to the sacristan to his cook consisted of Goans. Ofcourse it could also be that one unusually charismatic Goan, named Francis if I recall right, had managed to get onboard his staff and quickly convinced him that there were more from where he came.
St. Mary’s School became the de facto Goan school. It had a disproportionately large number of Goan teachers, who flaunted the clipped tones of India’s best convent schools. Owing possibly to the lack of alternative schools in Dubai at the time, it boasted a diversity of fifty-two nationalities, predominant among them Indian, Arab and British. It was slightly incongruous learning about the Henry VIII and cheering on William the Conqueror, in a Middle Eastern desert. Possibly it was a combination of British hubris and lack of any initiative on part of our principal that lead to a syllabus completely devoid of local history, geography or culture. For better or worse, it was here that I and countless other Goans spent their formative years in the company of Dickens and Somerset Maugham, developing ideas about the world and our place in it. It was the seventies, elsewhere in the world the Vietnam War was raging, the Soweto uprisings were questioning the status-quo in S.Africa and Israel was defending its territory in what would become known as the Yom Kippur War. I was too young to be aware of any of this. I was only just beginning to realise that the world was not entirely a fair place to live in, that it was ever so slightly more advantageous to be born white and that liberal ideologies were creeping into my consciousness which my parents found alien. In his later years for reasons I don’t wish to speculate on, Father Eusebius was shunted from one parish to another within the Gulf region and he died a somewhat broken man. The Church and School he built at times literally with his own bare hands went from strength to strength and exists today in testimony to his pioneering spirit and that of early Goans in Dubai. ------------------------ Any further information/input would be appreciate. Please don't write to tell me you never liked Father Eusebius or something that will not be of any interest to me. selma
