Smile Jamaica! Reni and Cecilia's Volunteer Trip

Reni Zhelyazkova Start Date: Jun 2, 2015 - End Date: Sep 29, 2015
  • Professional Development
  • Volunteer Trip
  • Cultural Exchange
  • Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica

My Travel Story

by: Reni Zhelyazkova Start Date: Jun 2, 2015 - End Date: Sep 29, 2015
  • Professional Development
  • Volunteer Trip
  • Cultural Exchange
Smile Jamaica

Reni and Cecilia's Volunteer Trip

Jamaica is an island with a unique soul. This is one of the things we learned on our first volunteering trip to this beautiful Caribbean country. What we also found out was that although the tourism industry is booming everywhere on the coast, the inner parts of the country suffer from a number of problems such as extreme poverty, economic inequality, poor education, lack of medical facilities and youth violence. Although the reality in Jamaica is a harsh one, funding from international organisations rarely reaches Jamaica, making development work extremely difficult. This is the reason why we want to dedicate our time, skills and knowledge to help the people, particularly the youth, of this incredible island.

From October to December 2014, we volunteered for the Social Development Commission of Jamaica after just having graduated from a degree in Anthropology of International Development. During these two and a half months, we participated in research, helped with workshops, trainings, events and worked at literacy centers to help young people learn how to write and read. But although this experience was great for learning about Jamaica and how social development works in reality, we soon realised that two and a half months were not enough to complete the projects we had started and to have a true impact on the lives of these extremely welcoming, positive and simply wonderful people. After coming back to London, we worked and volunteered for a number of development organisations and learned another lesson: working in an office in UK meant that we were detached from the communities we wanted to help and we couldn’t understand whether our work has a truly beneficial impact on them.

So here is our conclusion: we want to go back to Jamaica and work on projects we already started and which are now at a standstill because we didn’t have the time to apply for funding for most of them.

These projects include:

- Youth development with Manifesto Jamaica: using culture as a way to empower young people and open new perspectives for their future through the use of art, dance, music and creativity. 

- Promoting Community Tourism in the parish of St Mary: a way to generate income for poor communities in the highland.

- Finding ways to fund repair work on a number of community centres to enable people to hold events, trainings and workshops, particularly for young people who are finding it most difficult to get employment.

- Organising workshops for IT literacy, resume writing and interview skills, entrepreneurship to help people get into employment of start a business of their own.  

- 10 % of the money raised through this campaign will be used to provide learning tools for the literacy centres we volunteered for the first time.

Unfortunately, the Social Development Commission does not have the resources to pay us, but we are still extremely determined to go back and help the communities that became our friends, colleagues and partners.

We are doing our best to save as much money as we can from our jobs, but working in the charity sector is not the most profitable of endeavors.

So here is our ask! Help us help Jamaica! We need about £2250 to live in Jamaica for a period of 6 months. The other £250 pounds will be dedicated to three literacy centres. Every donation counts, so every person who funds ‘Smile Jamaica’ will receive a video greeting from us and Jamaicans with whom we are working!

Thank you! 

For more information on the organisations we volunteered for, please see: 
v2volunteer.com and sdc.gov.jm. For more information on the Community Tourism Project please click here. To see more from our first volunteer experience please visit our blog.
  • Saint Mary Parish, Jamaica