However, the Citizen Security and Justice Programme (CSJP) is helping to convert this, going beyond just enabling persons to develop skills, to assist inner city youth to enter professional fields.
For example, Randy Anderson, who was hopelessly scouring the document a few days ago for a job, is now halfway through his Bachelor of Science degree in International Transport and Logistics at the Caribbean Maritime Institute (CMI) with the assistance of the CSJP.
Trench Town's Dr. Claudia Allen has turn the first medical doctor in her family, having graduated in 2008 from the University of the West Indies (UWI), Mona, with the assistance of the CSJP.
Dr. Allen and Randy are only two of the 1,800 tertiary and high school students from inner city communities across the Kingston Metropolitan Area, Westmoreland and St. James who have benefitted from educational assistance under the CSJP's thrust to combat crime and force in interior cities, using education.
The CSJP is a multi-faceted crime and violence prevention initiative of the Ministry of National Security, focusing on building community safety and security. The curriculum is now in its second phase (CSJP II), having accomplished the original in 2009.
Programme Manager for CSJP II, Simeon Robinson, notes that youth aged 14 to 24 years are both victims and perpetrators of crime, and it is imperative that they are engaged, rehabilitated and resocialised.
"This investment by CSJP II, a crime prevention unit, simply aims to develop the link between crime and unemployment.through our nine days of exercise on the ground, we have learnt that an uneducated person is largely unemployable, and an unemployable person can more well be diverted into dysfunctional behaviour," he explains.
Randy knows only too easily the province of judgment that despair can trigger. He describes his smell of hopelessness as he recognized that to get a job he needed education, which he was unable to afford.
"Sunday after Sunday, the number of skipping the pages of the [newspaper] seeking jobs and preparing job applications had gotten depressing, because my efforts appeared futile. I was willing to get what the employers required, but my relatives couldn't afford to place me to college," he relates.
He tells JIS News he started a computer course at a community college, but was ineffective to perfect it, because of financial problems. After another class of sitting at home, he says his uncle introduced him to the CSJP.
"I really thank the CSJP for granting me approach to a better life. I will surely have the better of it and opened the eye of the inner-city youth to see that there is yet hope for a better education," Randy says. He hopes that one day he will likewise be capable to emulate the CSJP by helping other inner-city youth to finance their education.
Dr. Allen is similarly grateful, as she was struggling to finance her educational ambitions when the CSJP stepped in. She recounts that she was running and studying but that, after a while, it became extremely challenging, as her course became more time consuming.
Growing up in Trench Town, Kingston, the girl of two educators, she says she was ever taught the rate of concentrated study and education. However, the CSJP gave her the energy to achieve her dream.
"Being from the community of Trench Town, it could have been so easily for me to be a portion of the ever-increasing demographic that is either churning out babies, or being a division of violence or some such thing," Dr. Allen says.
She praises the CSJP for serving to nurture a better relationship between the security forces and the community, at a sentence when distrust of the law is high among inner-city residents.
Dr. Allen works at the Kingston Public Hospital (KPH), delivering care to the nation's sick. She acknowledges that while she even has a far way to go towards self-actualisation, "at least I have a science that I can stand myself, I am not qualified on anyone and I can keep my family. So I am very grateful".
On the outside, Doneilo Thomas looks like the stereotypical inner city 'corner' youth. But, while he sports his plaits, Doneilo has a different agenda. Instead of hanging idly around, each day he makes his way to the UWI, Mona, where he is a first-year medical student.
He too is a beneficiary of a CSJP scholarship. Doneilo says he heard around the CSJP, through the young club in his community of Nannyville Gardens in Mountain View, St. Andrew. A past student of Camperdown High School, he says his earliest aspiration was to get an architect, but that he fell into the natural sciences and grew to know that field. His ambition is to become a neurosurgeon.
He tells JIS News he was "overwhelmed" when he heard the CSJP had given his quest for a scholarship, and praises the CSJP for having trust in inner-city youth. He believes the CSJP is on the proper path in using education as a violence- prevention tool.
"Once someone has their time occupied, they get something positive to do, like schooling, there will be no clock for idleness.and the more enlightened people you get in Jamaica, it will be the more fat the country can become," he posits.
Doneilo is urging Jamaicans not to pay up on inner city youth, as they too make the voltage to get productive citizens. "Give them a chance. I find they will have the encounter with both hands," he says.
No comments:
Post a Comment