The winning SVGCC team. (Photo by iwnsvg.com) T he St. Vincent and the Grenadines Community College (SVGCC) has emerged victorious in the 2020 Windward Islands Debating Competition (WIDC). The St. Vincent students defeated the T.A. Marryshow Community College of Grenada in the finals of the competition which was held at the Goodwill Parish Hall in Dominica this month. Leader of the St. Vincent Community College debating team Deaney Gellizeau and fellow debater Zachary Richards opposed the topic, “The lack of youth involvement in local politics is a direct result of the political culture of the region”. Head of University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus-Dominica, Dr. Kimone Joseph announced the winning team, “The proposing team from Grenada received a total of 381.5 points and the opposing team from St. Vincent and the Grenadines received a total of 399.5 points. This means that the winning team for today in the finals is the St. Vincent and the Grenadines team.” Tiara Joseph, who represented the Grenada team, received the award for best speaker of the finals and also best overall speaker of the competition. Team SVGCC also received the “Team Excellence” award, graciously donated by CARICAD, which was designated for the team which best exemplified the true value of the competition. Team leader Gellizeau said that the debating competitions promote regional integration. “I think that it really promotes regional integration which is a very challenging issue of the Caribbean right now and with this kind of integration movement going on right now you are going to have a lot more interaction between people from different colleges,” he stated. He continued, “So information is going to be shared easily, quickly among the people of the different countries and it’s really a good thing to see [that] all the Caribbean countries are united together.” Gellizeau said that it is not about luck all the time. “Sometimes you really have to work hard to get where you are and I think that all of our teammates put in the effort,” he noted. (Source: Adapted from TDBN-DOMINICA) 8
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