A MUST READ STORY (Truly Inspirational): Tough life forced Jamaican Omar Newell to exceed expectations... St Mary boy overcomes poverty, physical abuse to become attorney

BY INGRID BROWN Associate editor — special assignment browni@jamaicaobserver.com  Sunday, July 12, 2015    
Omar Newell with his grandmother Enid Brown.
GROWING up in a one-bedroom house with five people could not dictate Omar Newell's future, as the now 33-year-old attorney was determined to make a better life for himself through the attainment of a good education.
Not only did the St Mary native grow up poor, but he also had to endure a stepfather who was abusive to him and his mother. However, this did not prevent him being successful in the Common Entrance Examination which first started him on the journey of utilising education as the vehicle to take him places.
"Everything I have been able to accomplish is through education. I can't think of any other vehicle that could propel a poor boy from St Mary to the places I have been and the things I have done," said Newell, who is now the consultant/project co-ordinator leading the Government's land titling project in the Ministry of Transport, Works and Housing.
Noting that education has transformed the way he thinks, Newell said he has always lived by the definition he has coined for excellence, which is simply "exceeding expectations".
"I would like to see poverty eradicated, but a lot of my learning and accomplishment was because of my being poor, because that is what drove me to exceed expectations," he said.
Omar Newell and his mother Ionie Vassell Brown
 and father Lloyd at his graduation from Northwestern
University of Law in Chicago.
He recalled a childhood which included going to different primary schools and moving frequently from one community to another with his family. Although he grew up in several communities in St Mary, Newell said his maternal grandmother, now deceased, often told him the story of her taking him from the hospital to her home in Islington where he lived with his mother until he was about two years old.
Up until he was 11, Newell grew up with his mother and stepfather when he was not being sent to live with his aunt Iris Murray, who took him with her whenever she had to relocate for her job as a midwife.
But according to Newell, his childhood was a "mixed bag of happiness" at some point and intense emotional and physical pain at other times.
He recalled growing up in Fraserwood, St Mary in a one-bedroom house with four other persons. "There were five of us sleeping on one bed -- my mother, stepfather, my stepfather's brother, and my little sister," he recalled.
As the oldest child, his responsibilities included caring for the family's livestock, cleaning the pig pen and tying out the goats before school in the mornings.
And, as if his life was not hard enough, Newell dealt with an abusive stepfather who, while he would provide for the family on one hand, would be equally violent on the other.
Newell said there were some good memories as he recalled his stepfather going out to do odd jobs and bringing home food to prepare a meal because they had not eaten all day.
"We never had money, so we would stay up until he got home from doing odd jobs and it was at that time he would go and fry some dumplings for us," he recalled.
Omar Newell (left) in Russia with fellow law students.
But Newell said his mother and stepfather would fight a lot, and, like his mother, he was not spared his stepfather's wrath.
"One day I went to the shop to buy big gill of oil and he realised that the bottle I had didn't have a cork and he slapped me in the face with a machete he had in his hand," Newell recalled. "Sometimes I would wonder how someone who had good in them would also have so much evil."
Unable to deal with all that was happening at home, Newell ran away at age 10, but his plan did not yield much fruit as he did not get further than his paternal grandmother in Portland, who promptly sent him back the next morning to a fine whipping. more

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