The Story Here

TW: This blog post mentions cases involving sexual assault and police-involved deaths. We've all seen it before - a story captures the attention and interest of the public, even though it may well be a story we've seen or heard before - sometimes countless times. 

So it's been a while for sure! The story here is... that we're ramping up for the busiest time of year for us at work , where we get to showcase our work, research and impact through events and of course...storytelling. So if you realize I'm quiet here, feel free to check me over on the other side. :) In between now and my previous post, we also had a whole volcano explode in the neighbouring island of St. Vincent (remember I'd alluded to the increased activity there in my New Year's Eve post?) , coating the north of that island and all of my country in toxic volcanic ash, closing airports and creating massive disruption, especially for the community residents living nearest to the volcano. As I type, cleaning crews are outside of my home cleaning up the ash, the final steps in what has been a weeks-long clean up effort. One thing about the 2020s - this decade is full of stories! That is a segue to my post - the next part in my 5 Ws and H of Storytelling series an...

  About six weeks ago, I was laying in my bed, doom-scrolling through the comments on the Instagram accounts of local news houses and distraught. My country was about to start rolling out its COVID-19 vaccination programme and the comments were filled with skepticism, hesitancy and outright hostility to the idea of getting vaccinated. Every dangerous and and unevidenced conspiracy about vaccination was circulating in the comments section, with a trail of likes and co-signing comments in their wake.  For someone like me who believes in the science behind vaccines and has seen the historical evidence of how my country's very efficient public immunization programme has improved our public health, this was far from encouraging. Taken against the background of a second surge of COVID-19 in the country, this feeling that the populace was very hesitant to vaccinate, meant that my mood was morose. ' We're going to be stuck inside forever. ' ' My daughter's childhood i...

Note: Portions of this were originally posted as an article in Islandista Magazine, a Caribbean women's publication I edited and published between 2008 to 2018. Significant modifications have been made to update it. "My $i$tren!!! My hitta!!! I know I tell you thi$ all the time, but Money cud neva buy what you give me!! Our friend$hip will alway$ be family! " Thus read part of the raunchy, riotous and deeply heartfelt birthday message which Barbadian superstar Rihanna posted on Instagram back in 2014 in tribute to her long-time best friend Melissa Forde . The post celebrated a friendship that stretches back decades to their days as schoolgirls at Barbados' Combermere School and which has stood the test of time and mind-boggling, world-wide fame. The two women's enduring bond illustrates the power of female friendship, a point Rihanna referred to in her Instagram tribute when she expressed her gratitude, saying: "I will never take for granted the day you ...

Not to sound like an old head talking about 'back in the day' but ...well... this all used to be a lot simpler back in the day. Twenty years ago, the media landscape was much, much simpler.  There was no social media of note - though shout out to the forerunners like mIRC, MSN and Yahoo Messenger and forums like Black Planet, which were early in tapping into our voracious appetite for digital socialising. I basically met my husband on MSN Messenger which is a lot less embarassing to say now in the 2020s than in the aughts, when meeting someone online seemed ...odd. The self-publishing and self-broadcasting that is now an everyday feature of our lives was very nascent. There were some websites of note but you really had to have pretty in-depth knowledge of HTML code to be able to maintain a website. Blogging platforms opened up a whole new world and then YouTube opened up even more and then when Facebook and Instagram allowed us go to live? Chile ... I don't know if we fully...