Growing up in Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth, we would play anything that involved competition: from hopscotch, jacks, marbles and racing handmade wooden trucks to more traditional sports like cricket, football, track and even bicycle racing down the lane. As the youngest, I always had to be playing catch up to my bigger, stronger, faster… Read more →←
Topic: Safety and justice
Tajaun and his mother benefitted from a UNICEF-supported parenting programme operated by the Women’s Centre of Jamaica Foundation, which is designed to help adolescent mothers feel more empowered and confident about themselves and the care, protection and support they give to their children. By investing in adolescent parents today,… Read more →←
At age 12, I learned a lesson about violence when I became a babysitter in my extended family. Growing up, I had already learned that the way to discipline was to beat, and so with my brothers, sister, and cousins, that was what I did. But then one day one of my brothers fought back and said, “Wait, when we get older, we are going to… Read more →←
Sometimes I feel like giving up but every time I think about it, the baby comes to mind. If he is safe, then I’m all right. For me, the next step is to keep trying with my CSEC subjects. Before COVID-19, I didn’t feel like I was in prison. But it’s been hard dealing with this – as a father and as a high school student. Not being… Read more →←
Aged 16, Damoie Byfield is recalling the day he had to run for his life, jumping into a gully just as a gunman’s bullet grazed his chest. He’s telling it so vividly, and with such a knowing smile that his mother Shian Leslie is finding it hard to hold back not tears, but actually laughter – relief that her son survived. If that… Read more →←
COVID-19 has challenged us at Fight for Peace to stay in touch with all the children and youth we had been giving face-to-face support. For people who live in the downtown Kingston communities where our Psycho-social Support Team works, one of the biggest challenges is access to services. Their mental health is no different, and a time… Read more →←
“It brings us together, it teaches us how to participate and it teaches us how to protect ourselves.” – 13-year-old Alphanso Edwards from Fletcher’s Land, a participant in the taekwondo programme by UP Unity & Peace. On a hot, still Friday in downtown Kingston residents are awakening from the peak of the lockdown necessitated… Read more →←
My father died a week ago. He wasn’t always a part of my life and when we reasoned, a lot of times he would say, ‘Listen I wasn’t the father I was supposed to be at your age,’ but at least I made him proud in showing the difference a father can make for his children. I was angry at him growing up, especially when I would be sent… Read more →←
COVID-19 has taught me that if we have some amount of courage, and if we are kind to others, then we will be able to see the world not as it is, but as what the world can be. I left my community of 8 Miles, St. Ann at the age of 15 to go into state care, and my relationship with people there and my family was something I wanted to… Read more →←
U-Report recently polled young Jamaicans on their views about fears of a potential increase in domestic abuse due to stay-at-home conditions during COVID-19, and to ask their advice to inform a project for the Spotlight Initiative – a partnership between the United Nations, the European Union and the Government of Jamaica to reduce… Read more →←