I am going to tell a personal story today. It’s about opportunity.

When I was a very little girl, I wanted to be an air hostess. I simply loved the restaurant lounge that looked over the runway at Norman Manley International Airport. Within a couple years, I had changed my mind. I wanted to be an actress. However, my Dad asked me how I expected to look after myself in that line of work. At which point, the youngest of my brothers piped up, “I’ll look after you.” Sweet, eh! In many ways, he actually has always looked after me and looked out for me, like all my siblings. Sometime before I turned ten, I decided on another career and this one stuck for the rest of my childhood and teen years. I was going to be a criminal lawyer.

Growing up, great importance was given to the value of education. I was treated no differently to my brothers when it came to academics. We had to do well. I don’t recall conversations pertaining to this exactly, but it was something we just knew we had to do. This came easily to us all, as did the various sports we chose, but it was not easy being away from home. We each had to find a coping mechanism that suited our individual personalities, and we had to build a resilience to loneliness. Don’t get me wrong, strong friendships with our school peers were formed by each of us, but there are times, like bedtime, when you are laying there wishing you could have that last conversation with your family, not a bunch of strange children lying on the other beds in a dormitory. I am fairly certain most of the other kids felt the same. Alas, exhaustion from our busy day would take over and the next thing to worry about would be:”How on earth do I get out from under my warm duvet on this freezing morning?!” Mandatory-timed breakfast, that’s how! Another busy day started and the goal remained the same: excel at what you do.

So, what happened with my plan to be a lawyer? Well, I did my A Levels (again, academic-focused) in sixth form, then took a year off to work and backpack around Australia, New Zealand and Fiji with one of my closest friends from school. Following this, I got my Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy at the LSE, then went straight to the Leith’s School of Food & Wine. I had had enough of academia. I don’t know if this was spurred on by the arrogance of my peers, who studied the same discipline, or if there had always been a creative side of me waiting to burst out. In school, I had hated arts & craft and home economics, and all of my 10 GCSEs had been academic subjects. One did not do the “arts” in our family!!

With my degree in philosophy and my diploma in food and wine, I began working in all kinds of kitchens at all kinds of places. I loved it. London was on fire with brilliant restaurants. The English were finally making great waves when it came to getting rid of their long-time reputation of having crap food. The private chef business was also booming and I soon found that I fitted really well into this niche. If you were a chef, people were impressed. It was right around the time when chefs like Jamie Oliver were being discovered. Cooking shows were all over the television, and cable TV was a new thing.

One day, I got a call from my agent at the chef agency I worked through. She wanted me to apply for this great gig at the BBC Good Food show. She said I’d be perfect for it. So, I went to the interview, knowing very little about the job, by the way. I sat across from this television producer, who wanted to figure out a way to promote BBC’s brand new cable food channel. All he told me was that they had a food truck to utilise and he had a vague vision of an American diner. Off the cuff, I came up with the idea of cooking mini portions of diner-style food, with a twist, and serving these to customers as they sat in the ‘diner’ to watch video clips from their new channel. At the show, patrons were not only watching the video clips, they were also watching me cook. I am pretty sure my mini burgers in mini coco breads did the trick! Before I knew it, along with my other freelance chef work, I spent the next couple years being a guest chef on their live TV show, Good Food Live. In fact, they even brought me back home to Jamaica to film a series of short inserts, of me cooking across the island, for the live show. It was incredible.

As time went on, I found myself writing for various magazines, like BBC Good Food, and developing recipes. I was good at it, so went to New York to take a diploma in Journalism. Here began my long transition into becoming a full-time freelance writer. You see, I moved back to Jamaica and got roped into teaching cooking. Two years later, I took the plunge and sent an idea for a ‘Single in the City’ column to the Gleaner. They hired me to be a freelance writer and, over the next five years, I took on several columns and a couple different aliases. I had found another career about which I was passionate. During this time, the Observer’s Lifestyle section was really taking off. I wanted to be a part of the action, so I wrote and asked them to hire me. I spent almost three years writing for them. I had a phenomenal editor, who pushed me to write about things I would never have thought of before. She made me a better writer and did not accept anything less than her required standards, which were high! This, in turn, gave me a very valuable skill: the skill of editing. If you wanted your work published in full, you had better learn how to edit your own work with excellence! I wrote for a few magazines while doing all of this, but, of course, the print world began losing out to online media. Times were changing, so jobs were changing. It was time to write a novel.

I self-published my first novel on Amazon three years ago and I am currently sitting on my second, which is, essentially, finished. But, the pandemic happened and happenstance, along with my niece, threw me in the direction of a nonprofit organisation, Cornerstone Jamaica, for which I have been volunteering as a CyberSafety Specialist for over a year. Throughout my life, I have met all kinds of people and one of them has been the founder of a successful nonprofit organisation called CyberSafe Kids, in Ireland. They have educated more than 25,000 children on CyberSafety in the last six years. This organisation trained me in CyberSafety, so that I could start doing the same for Jamaican children. I spearheaded, designed and wrote a CyberSafety programme for Cornerstone Jamaica, called CyberSafe Yuhself. Between the last school term, and the current one, I have given live and interactive online CyberSafety workshops to almost 1800 children and 150 of their teachers, in Westmoreland, Hanover, Clarendon and St. Mary. I truly believe that every human being, who goes online, should be versed in CyberSafety.

In the midst of my volunteer work, something extraordinary has occurred. Many of you must know LinkedIn, right? Well, I’ve been a member for a good while now, but I have not been so active on it. In the last few months, however, I noticed that there has been more activity on my page, so I updated my profile in mid-October. No sooner had I done that, when someone reached out to me and, figuratively, showed me the stairway to a career I would never have chosen for myself. You see, I have always trained for particular niches – cooking, writing, CyberSafety. Don’t ask me about the Philosophy part when it comes to careers, but I have actually used it in much of my writing. Anyway, I have never been formally trained for the work offered before me. That said, what if all my experiences and skills, acquired along the way, were indeed leading me right into this job? What if I am supposed to do this? Well, yesterday I started to officially climb those stairs!