Albertha Waite, UBP candidate for Devonshire North Central:

Old-fashioned family values, employment opportunities for young people and improving basic services such as garbage collection lie at the heart of Albertha Waite's platform.

As a first-time candidate in a general election, she may be new to an election campaign but Mrs. Waite has a history of grassroots politics, having fought against Government plans for additional public housing in the flat top houses of Mary Victoria/Alexandra Road.

And politics obviously runs in the family — her cousin Dr. Denzel Douglas is the Prime Minister of St. Kitts.

"Denzel is a cousin of ours and we have family that goes over every year. We had a Douglas family reunion in May and we'll have a second reunion in St. Kitts in 2009. We're a big family!" she says.

"But I consider myself to be an ordinary person. This is not a road I ever saw myself taking, but I firmly believe the good Lord knows when the time is right to do something.

"I'm basically a family person, my family values are very high and I'm quiet strict when it comes to children.

"I want to encourage our young men out there to father their children, even if mother and father are no longer together. Unity between the parents is something we need to get our young men to realise."

Mrs. Waite grew up in Middletown and attended Purvis Primary and Sandys Secondary School before gaining a diploma in cosmetology.

She worked in the beauty business and then as a cashier with the Piggly Wiggly supermarket chain, before becoming Director of Human Resources for MarketPlace six years ago.

According to her UBP profile, Mrs. Waite was also the first black woman to become the manager of a full-service supermarket in Bermuda, at Somerset MarketPlace.

Mrs. Waite lives in the Devonshire North Central constituency, in Alexandra Road, and was chairwoman of the Mary Victoria/Alexandra Road neighbourhood housing committee which successfully opposed Government plans to create more public housing in the already densely-populated Prospect area.

She has been married to Trevor for 37 years and has three sons and a six-year-old granddaughter.

Mrs. Waite is a member of Christ Church, Devonshire, and also enjoys speaking to schoolchildren at CedarBridge Academy, Dellwood Middle School and Prospect Primary School about their career choices.

According to her UBP profile, Mrs. Waite's policies are: to develop programmes to help young people gain employment; to create more parks and playgrounds; to push for better-maintained roads, street lighting and reliable garbage collection; and, to encourage better community policing and neighbourhood watch schemes.

Her profile says: "Albertha is committed to providing opportunities for the 'forgotten guys' that she sees in her constituency."

Mrs. Waite told The Royal Gazette: "In the neighbourhood, there are young men who feel they have no hope because they don't have high school diplomas, but I want them to know there is a solution for this.

"They could find a business establishment and involve themselves in a technical trade, study, gain their GED (General Education Diploma) and become productive members of the community."

She adds: "A lot of workers in the hotels on the Island are not Bermudian and so we need to bring this back. It's just a matter of going back to basics.

"We need to build our young people up, not put them down. We need to build up their self esteem and enthusiasm. We need to get them to feel good about who they are."

Living in the constituency, Mrs. Waite says she understands the grumbles of her neighbours. She says: "Any concerns that people have are also my concerns.

"The things that matter to them also matter to me, such as making sure our children have a playground and that our seniors have a quiet area to go to. Street lighting needs to be improved around here, as does the garbage collection."

Mrs. Waite says she recently organised a neighbourhood clean-up in Mary Victoria/Alexandra Road, and this is something the residents of Cedar Park Road have told her they are also "very excited" about doing.

"My main objective is to bring the whole constituency together so we can be one big neighbourhood, so everyone looks out for each other," she says.

"I'm also very concerned about our seniors. Those seniors who have worked all their lives and then the companies have taken a proportion of their pension — even though the Government is getting behind those companies now to get them to make payments, I would like to see that being passed on to the seniors who deserve it.

"And our single parents — that is another real problem we need to take care of, such as through providing more day care centres for children."

Mrs. Waite says: "I want to be able to get out there and assist. I decided I would stand up and involve myself so I can be involved in making change. I want to make a difference."