For Dr Stanley Moonsawmy “it was a bit of a cultural shock in that transport and housing was so totally different from the tropical area from which I originated … I thought the people looked very dark and grey in their winter and summer coats. Their faces were so white and pasty! I was then able to put that together with my previous experience in Guyana, whereby our indigenous people, the Red Indian Carib tribes, had a word for the white man, which was the same word for ghost, and I then realised in my own feelings that it was probably a good description!” Looking back to his first years in Edinburgh he thought “the local people were very reserved … they would not speak to you openly; you had to be introduced. I think there was a lot of shyness on both sides in those early days and there was nothing really meant behind it but it was just their culture that I had to adapt to … I noticed they spoke with a stiff upper lip and didn’t use their eye contact and their hands or their facial features when they were speaking so they were very formal.”

Lynette Richards-Murray found it “surprising when we got here because we had white porters to pick up our luggage and that was one of the first shocks because in Guyana all the white people that we came into contact spoke like Prince Charles and they were in very high positions.”

Thelma Lewis arrived in December. “It was very cold, no one spoke to anybody and what

surprised me was I stayed one night at the YWCA in Baker Street, looking through the window I saw these buses coming up to one stop. I didn’t realise they were different numbers and I wondered why the passengers were not getting on! People were choosing and not because the bus was full up; it was because they were different numbers, which I didn’t realise.”

Lynette Richards-Murray (third from left) during presentation