Confidence is Odessa Phillips’ watchword
Stabroek News
September 16, 2002
“Being confident is the way out,” is the motto of the reigning Miss Guyana/World queen, Odessa Phillips, and perhaps it was confidence which helped her to be crowned queen two Saturdays ago.
Certainly she thought that this was so, since she told Stabroek News that she knew she was going to win all through the period running up to the pageant.
Now Libra-born Odessa Abenaa Phillips, who carries a name which she said was both English and African, will represent Guyana at the Miss World pageant slated for November in Nigeria.
The final year law student at the University of Guyana (UG), who hails from Vergenoegen on the West Bank Demerara, spoke to Stabroek News recently about her days as a contestant, her childhood in the country and what she plans to do even if she does not win the Miss World crown.
She said that it was a pleasure for her to be in the Miss Guyana/World competition. “At one point I even forgot there was a pageant because I was having so much of fun. It was until the girls started saying, seven days to go, a week to go, that I realised that we had a pageant or we had an event to compete in. But every now and then when I would remember the pageant, I would just think `OK Odessa, you need to be very confident,’” she told this newspaper.
According to the new queen she encountered no problem because she is a “disciplined” person and was always on time. She was only absent from practice on two or three occasions, and that was on account of illness.
“Most of all what I enjoyed was the courtesy calls and the outings that we had to Baganara, Baracara and Splashmins. Going to those three resorts, tourist attractions... whatever you want to call it, really gave me time to bond with the girls... having fun besides just the regular training that we would normally have,” Phillips recalled.
She disclosed that she was the last contestant to enter the pageant, and that when she did, training had commenced already three weeks prior to her arrival.
However, she said, she had received tremendous support from Melissa Archer, whom she described as “very caring” towards her.
Archer filled her in on what she had missed, along with another contestant, Marceline Basdeo, whom she described as a “very, very kind person.”
Other contestants singled out for special mention by the queen were Ali Williams, Samantha Crandon and Bibi Gaffar, who were all girls with whom she really bonded.
And what does winning the crown mean to Phillips?
“Being an extremely good role model,” she replied, “because what I have done is that I have highlighted my community once again. For some amount of time my community has been known as ‘the Blackie community’ because ‘Blackie’ was from there and we were seen as the ‘black sheep.’ What I have done is to show them that we can be highlighted in a positive way rather than a negative way.”
Secondly, she said it meant a lot to her because she never thought that as a law student she would have been able to balance studying with an activity as rigid as being involved in a pageant.
However, it is not the first time Phillips has been involved in a pageant. She copped the first-runner-up position in the Miss UG pageant earlier this year.
The 5 ft 9” inches young woman described herself as having shoulder-length black hair, brown eyes, being of a light-brown complexion and weighing about 130 pounds. She said that she was a very friendly person and a lover of nature.
She liked hiking, riding, camping and swimming, and she loved being among the trees and flowers.
She said that growing up in a rural area was a lot of fun for her.
On weekends, said Phillips, she and her older cousins would go swimming in a huge, black trench. “I also remember climbing trees and plunging into the smooth surface of the water where I would swim for hours until I was wrinkled.” As a child she always preferred outdoor activities, and as a result most of her friends were boys, “but nevertheless, I was always easily distinguished by my bouncing fat plaits and matching dresses and ribbons.”
She attended the Stewartville Secondary School and obtained nine subjects at CXC before going on to UG.
She was born to Barbara and George Phillips, a teacher and a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force respectively. She has a younger sister, Akuwa Phillips, who wrote CXC this year and is now a teacher. She said she has other siblings who live outside Guyana since her father was married before he met her mother.
Asked what she would do should she return to Guyana without the crown, Odessa had this to say, “Oh definitely lots of charitable work, like going back to the Guyana Responsible Parenthood Association... and wherever else I could as a volunteer.”
She said that she would be focusing on the reduction of poverty, and that she could make a difference at the GRPA where there is a programme to take youths off the streets, and arrange for school dropouts and those who are pregnant to receive schooling for about two years. Following that they are given a test, graduate, receive a certificate and are assisted in finding employment.
This, she said, was a system which would reduce poverty as some of the street children would be taken off the streets.
Some countries are boycotting the Miss World pageant in Nigeria because of the sentence - death by stoning - which has been imposed on a 30-year-old woman, Amina Lawal, for committing adultery.
Odessa was asked if she thought Guyana should join the boycott to send a message to that country and she answered in the negative.
“I don’t think that it would make much a difference to boycott,” she said. “What I think is that if we can go there we can make a difference by speaking out against it [the sentence].., There are supposed to be 109 contestants, meaning 109 countries competing, and I heard that there are only 88 remaining now. Still that hasn’t changed their [the relevant Nigerian authorities’] decision; they are going to stone her... But I’m totally against it - the stoning of a woman or of anybody - it is so inhumane. We can go there and fight for that woman’s right rather than just staying away.”