 The organization, which was founded by Monsignor Patrick Anthony, came together about 26 years ago to really and truly preserve and promote the cultural heritage of the country and our Creole language. There was a realization that they were very marginalized people. In St. Lucia, marginalized mainly because of the language, the fact that they did not speak English, and with them was dying a very rich cultural heritage. So basically what the aim of the Focusset Center was to ensure not only that these folks got a voice, but basically that their language would be understood and appreciated and developed to that point, and also that the cultural heritage which surrounds their entire existence would be preserved as something which is truly valuable to St. Lucia. We started very much in the early days going down to all the corners of St. Lucia, researching cultural practices that we didn't even know we had in St. Lucia. We did not know that they were part of us, and in so doing we discovered St. Lucia's people and communities and life, the life that gave both to us as we are now, and we can see things that we are not being taught in our education, and developing a pride and a joy in all of those discoveries and wanting everybody else to know it and beginning to understand the importance of such knowledge in our future development. The Focusset Center work right now is organized around programs in the main. We had many program areas which we collapsed a few years ago into two major program areas that's culture and education, in which we bring culture and education to formal school system and to communities, and we stimulate culture and cultural activity within that program area, and language development where we focus on the Creole language in particular, but our central work has always been around research, documentation, analysis and popular dissemination of information on our food culture. Focusset Center or this institution, as I was saying, I mean that was more or less my launching pad in the arts, really, that's where I really started, you know, all this acting thing. In fact, what I was doing is identifying these things out there and seeing how I could adapt it to stage because a lot of these things was functioning in the community so it was then my way of representing, you know, some of these things that I was dying, some of the arts that I was dying within the community, I mean making it come alive on stage. So a lot of my work, if you look at some of my work, I have a lot of influence on a lot of our traditions, you know, I mean storytelling, the way I am directly, even my acting style is very much a solution acting style. You're not aware of that but it's things, you know, I watch old men, I watch, you know, I mean communities, the storytellers within the community telling stories and the way they carry themselves, the posture, you know, I mean I learn a lot from these people. We recognize that a lot of forms are being changed, a lot of cultural expressions and cultural traditions are dying and we think it's so important for us to preserve in a way that next, the future generations can experience it as closely as possible. The Junectual falls within our language development program. It started off as a focus on our language to try and get us to understand our language and appreciate it a lot more. But then very quickly when we got into Junectual we realized that we cannot divorce language from the realities of the society itself. Okay, so the focus on Junectual started off as a focus on language. It came off focus on our people and our Creole traditions. We perceived that despite all and we developed skills and knowledge and experience in areas where a lot of our governments were not paying attention to. And when development came upon us and we were calling for, you know, experience with skills in areas like language development, our Creole language, some of the cultural forms in folk arts and so on. We would have been found wanting if the focus center had not persevered in some of the areas. So we reached a point where government and governments worked and they worked with the education, the experience, the cultural department could not ignore the tremendous experience and the resources that the focus center had developed. And you find in the last few years we have been getting lots of support. We cannot exist without the culture. I mean people ignoring it but it's something that you cannot ignore. So if you try to ignore it, it will be there confronting you every time. So I'm seeing that, look, this work will just continue. You know, it will just continue because we haven't got a choice. And some of us are gifted to do that kind of work. We cannot do nothing else. So as long as we are alive, that's what we will continue to do. You know, that's what the focus center will continue to do. That's what I will continue to do. That's what other cultural activists in this country will continue to do. The satisfaction one has working at the focus center is that you are forced to become a cultural activist. You are forced to understand yourself. You are forced to understand and respect people, respect language, respect cultural forms, respect indigenous habits, etc. And that's one, to me, that's one of my greatest satisfactions working here. I understand my culture better. I understand my people better. I understand my history better. And it makes you become almost a mouthpiece. It forces you to become a mouthpiece for the culture of St. Lucia and for the history of St. Lucia. I can say with confidence that we have contributed quite a bit to that change and development and attitude of St. Lucia and pride towards ourselves, our riches, our resources, our land, our culture. And that is a very, very, very significant achievement of the focus center. We haven't stopped. We've continued. We are continuing now. We are facing a new century, lots of new challenges. What we are hoping to do throughout the next millennium is to ensure that we keep our breast milk technology. We use it so that we can make the best of it to ensure that our information we have gets disseminated and that people become more and more aware. Also, we are trying in terms of language development to ensure that there is government support and government policy and we were basically assured that by the prime minister. And we are working right now on a program to present to him so that we can know what the next step is for the language in St. Lucia in terms basically of the orthography which is the writing of the language. And we are going to be pushing in that direction and to basically see that the language is respected, taught and respected as a language is understood so that we have people in St. Lucia who are not only bilingual but who also are able to write the language and therefore assign the language its place in this country.