POPULATION-JAMAICA: Children Help Children to Improve Their Lives

By Zadie Neufville Reprint | | Print |

Zadie Neufville

KINGSTON, May 3 2001 (IPS) - May is Child Month in Jamaica and children are among those who are trying to make a difference in their community.

Take Kerry Ann Williams for example, she is one of about 55 children trying to change the negative stereotype that shadows the pile of wooden houses in a crime ridden section of capital city Kingston.

Behind the unpainted houses and ramshackle zinc fences lining the dirt track known as Mandela Terrace, the 11 year-old counsellor-in-training and award winning performer is helping her peers to break the cycle of crime, poverty, illiteracy and unemployment that stalks the community.

More than 100 families live in Mandela Terrace and most are unemployed.

Kerry Ann is part of 3Cs or Children and Community for Change a project of the Jamaica AIDS Support, Christian Aid in London and Jamaica Hope for Children. 3Cs has been operating since May 1997 and uses the performing arts to effect behavioural change as part of its Mandela Terrace Life Skills project.

The project sets out to get adolescents to delay their first sexual experience, encourage safer sexual practises and raise self-esteem in a place where serious crime and pregnancy is high among teens.

It is the organisers’ hope that the children of Mandela Terrace will help halt the spread of HIV among teens through the education of inner city children. The community was chosen they say, because it had all the elements health authorities here believe contribute to the spread of sexually transmitted diseases – crime, poverty and illiteracy.

That job suddenly became harder a year ago, when United States Peace Corps volunteer Deanna Kepka made her presentation to the 11th Annual UN AIDS Conference in South Africa.

A local newspaper report from the conference stated that Kepka’s study among 50 young people in the community found a 10 percent rate of HIV infection, high illiteracy, and unsafe sexual practices.

The newspaper report created divisions within the community and changed the once carefree group into a wary bunch. They say the report has tarnished a community already burdened by crime and teenage pregnancy.

“The paper made us feel really bad,” Kerry Ann said.

Head of Jamaica AIDS Support Ian McKnight says Kepka was at the conference to present the findings of a successful programme, one that showed how timely intervention can change behaviour.

The controversial study found that the young residents were likely to indulge in risky sexual behaviour because they knew nothing about sex, sex education or AIDS. This is a reflection of a 1998 Ministry of Health study that showed that half the island’s children are at risk of contracting HIV, because they were ignorant about the disease.

Now the children are working harder than before to repair the damage caused by the newspaper report and they have sought the help of their parents and community leaders.

And, the programme no longer has Peace Corps volunteers and will not be having any until the community has lived down the fall-out from Kepka’s report, project manager Seymour Hinds said.

Ian Williams (no relation to Kerry Ann) is another of Mandela Terrace’s children who says that prior to the programme he was unable to read or write. Now the 13-year old is a counsellor-in-training, performer and is looking forward to a future as a school teacher.

Ian says the programme has changed his and the lives of many of his playmates.

“It is a challenge for me and my friends to change our lives. It teaches us to set goals, to get off the streets and stop idling. It gives us a future,” he said.

The children say the programme helps them to deal with life, with conflicts, how to avoid drugs and how to become a better person. It also provides guidance and exposure to a world they would not have otherwise known because of lack of opportunities and money, they say.

These days 3Cs’ progress is hampered by a lack of funding.

Hinds wants to reach as many as 100 young people between the ages of 11 and 25 each year. He says, however, that it takes 60,000 US dollars a year to run such a programme and currently he must make do with one-third of that.

Come September Hinds hopes to start a series of training programmes for the younger residents.

Dianna Campbell, one of three adults employed to the programme, is eagerly anticipating the start of the programmes. The mother of four says she has seen the project’s influence in providing homework help, school placements and follow-up and life skills, all of which are desperately needed in the community.

“Here it is so easy for the young children to get mixed up in all kinds of things, and the programme gives them a place other than the sidewalk to spend their time” she said.

“It is teaching them what they need to know about life and helping them to do what they want to do. There is no encouragement from politicians for 16 and 17 years olds,” she said noting that society is only too willing to give up on young people from the inner-city.