Valerie’s shows her spirit of adventure

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If Valerie Rose Wade of Cook’s Hill, Somerset, who is blind, hadn’t given any thought to how widely esteemed and greatly admired she is in her community, her church, on her job as a receptionist at Sandys Secondary Middle School, and wherever she impacts as a Sunday School teacher, in her ministry of song, as a youth leader and missionary at large, she surely must have sensed it at her 60th birthday celebration earlier this week.

A host of relatives and friends from one end of the Island to the other, testifying to her good spirit and style, packed the Arthur S Jones Auditorium at Allen Temple AME Church, wishing her well while feasting on a sumptuous buffet.

For more than an hour earlier in the church itself at a praise and thanksgiving service, Valerie was hailed as a good Christian woman, the ‘epitome of blind faith’ unlike that of Thomas, the doubting disciple of biblical notoriety; as a multi-talented, personality, who bears her impairment with dignity and charm; and thanked by first one then another for having straightened them in their Christian walk.

One friend, Mrs Shirley Gillis of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, made a whirlwind two-day trip to Bermuda to sing a song to Valerie and bring congratulations from friends in her town where Valerie went in her early 20s to qualify for her GED, after having attended West End School and Sandys Secondary.

Valerie was born with a nerve impairment called Retinis Pigmentosis that led to her blindness.

One thing that seems to make Valerie stand out is her adventurous spirit; and how she courageously showed the Bermuda flag in two ocean-going tall ship races. The first was from Scotland in 1995 aboard the Lord Nelson, and more recently in 2010, on the same vessel, which is designed to be operated by crew with disabilities of one sort or another. After one episode with the elements, she brazenly told the captain, “we made it only because God was in charge.” The captain corrected her, saying he (the captain) was in charge, and she left it at that!

Valerie was the fourth of the six children born to Arthur Wade and his wife, the former Islowe Simmons, a stalwart in the Friendly Society movement. During the Second World War , Arthur served overseas with the BMA Contingent of the Caribbean Regiment.

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