IT WAS twenty-three years ago that I stood before a class of students at the start of the Michaelmas term and breathlessly asked them what they had done for their summer holidays. I expected to be regaled with stories of trips to the sea, wonderful adventures with friends, and the unending chatter that exudes from teenagers who have a lot to share, but instead I got a mixture of blank stares, sighs and long faces.
“Summer was boring,” one boy said. The whole class seemed to be in agreement, but that did something to me. I couldn’t imagine this class of thirty children, with all the energy and exuberance that youth has to offer, spending a boring summer. It was 1997, and I was still very enthusiastic about working with young people in the secondary setting. Something had to be done! And it was out of that one single question in the first week of a new term that I had the idea of having a summer camp.
The idea grew and was watered by my imagination. By the time summer rolled around again, I had enlisted the help of friends who never seemed to grow tired of my penchant for dreaming. While one friend penned the song for the camp, another offered her services. I busied myself with convincing my pastor at the time to allow me to have a summer camp at the church. As it turned out, he didn’t take much convincing. Pastor Brown was all for it.
The camp would be completely free, and a two-week timetable would see children drawn from my school and my church going on tours, watching movies, listening to guest speakers, and doing arts and craft. The pronouncement of one of my students at the end of it all, “This was the best camp that I ever went to!” was impetus to keep the ball rolling. Out of that camp was born the children’s charity Kids in Action—KIA.
By the next year, we had T-shirts with the KIA logo of a rainbow. Taking Matthew 19:14 as our scripture verse, the idea of an organization that would empower children and get them to use their gifts and talents crystalized into a children’s Christmas program complete with Christmas Angel, a skit and songs. By 2000, KIA was sending a small knot of five children to learn to sail at the Barbados Yacht Club. They proudly graduated with sailing certificates.
Any adventure that was both fun and educational, I wanted the children to try. In those early years, we went on board an Atlantis submarine, saw the West Coast on a glass-bottom boat and, after 2000, went underground and just operated with private funds that were used mostly in Inter-School Christian Fellowship at my school. But the dream never died. My mother had pronounced since I was a child that I would be a teacher and that I would drive a small car. I don’t know how she knew this, but that was exactly what happened. The early years, I invited children to church, picking them up in the neat Subaru J10 I lovingly called Gertie and whisking them off to services where the pastor welcomed them, shorts and all, to gatherings that they did not want to leave.
In the new millennium, the dream slowly metamorphosed. During this time, I grew to understand the lives of my children more. Many were unhappy because home was an unhappy place. Many did not know how to dream of a better tomorrow. Many carried weights that were far too heavy for children, and many longed to be just children. These were all things that I could relate to, and while people my age were forming relationships, marrying and getting on with their lives, I was gradually healing from my own broken childhood by reaching out to children.
Kids in Action lived inside of me. The name was born out of an experience I had in 1987 as a tour guide to a secondary school from Martinique called Form’Action. I had spent that summer long ago wearing a T-shirt that my mother bought for me with the word “Action” emblazoned across the front; and since nobody told me that I couldn’t do it, I worked out the itinerary for the visiting school, which included tours, lunch at Cave Shepherd, a cricket match and a shopping day. I hired a private bus and put the French that I was studying at university to good use by being tour guide, interpreter and activities coordinator. When I was trying to find a name for my summer camp in 1998, I remembered that period and, borrowing from the name of the school, came up with Kids in Action. Many years later, I discovered that it was in fact a very common name for a children’s organization, but KIA mine remained and was registered as such in 2010.
I believe that within every human being is a special gift that only he or she has the ability to unwrap and give away. Sometimes, we cannot find the way to get to that gift, and, sometimes, we don’t even know that it is there, but God had been packaging mine from childhood. My mother used to tell people that I would be a teacher because I loved children, and it was my mother who advised me to apply to schools when I came back to Barbados from Paris, where I had worked as a teacher’s assistant.
“Sow to all winds,” she said. “Apply to all the schools that you can think of.”
I dutifully obeyed. After a few expressed misgivings (some relatives thought that I was wasting my brains), Pastor Brown told me to see it as a calling. When I asked him to use the church for my summer camp in 1998, he seemed to think that I was falling into my calling….and he was right. I cannot think of a single thing that makes me as happy as seeing children laugh with all the innocence, wonder and abandon of youth. It makes me want to nurture their gifts, gather them up and tell them how special they are, help them to test their wings and then watch them soar.
*
In 2008, I asked God how I could give back to the young people in my childhood community. I thought that he was going to tell me to go witnessing, but instead He challenged me to use my gift of writing to start a writing camp. I did that out of the Clapham Community Centre using the Kids in Action name. With the help of a friend, every summer we offered two-week reading camps for three years free of charge, providing the textbooks, stationery, and arts and craft supplies. We paid for the speakers to visit and had a rollicking time the year Auntie Deanne (Kennedy) visited with her drum, her Anansi spider and famous black belly sheep that she had made herself. The children were divided into age groups, 7-9 and 10-11. We had an interactive tour of the Museum one year, picnicked at the historic Garrison another, and learned how to write stories and how to improve our reading skills. Always, there were lessons about the love of God, because in all my years of living, He had been the one constant who got me through the roughest of times, and I wanted the children to know that, truly, He was a friend who stuck around when the world walked out.
By 2010, the desire to help older children grew. I realized that we were attracting mainly boys, and we reached out to the neighbourhood young men who limed on the block. We told them about God’s love and took them to dinner at Chefette’s BBQ Barn one evening. By this time, I had left the secondary school setting and was teaching at the tertiary level. One of my former students who was a police officer volunteered his services to help with the boys, and his presence lent a balance to the sessions. We enrolled seven of the young men in the Skills Training program; two graduated at the top two of their class and went on to get jobs. I was brimming with joy.
KIA accomplished so much that sometimes it seemed as though time stood still. The children were always on the go. They thoroughly enjoyed being on air one year with Barbados’ first poet laureate, Esther Phillips, on What’s That You’re Reading?, a radio program co-hosted by ArtsEtc editor Linda M. Deane. The children attended Bim LitFest in Independence Square, were a part of Linda’s Summer Storyteller program, learned to cook in the Parkinson Memorial home ec room with Chef Selena “Rebel Glam” Dodson, toured the Garrison and had lunch at the Museum. One Easter, they flew kites on a nearby pasture of the Garrison and then went to bring cheer to the residents of a neighbourhood nursing home. They even visited the children’s ward at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, prayed with the children and handed out gifts. In short, they learned to use their gifts and talents while having fun.
KIA also sponsored a summer writers’ camp that was attended by adults and young people in 2011 at Parkinson. Out of it came two published authors and an after-camp outing that the best author could not have scripted. The bus tour, lunch in Queen’s Park and tour of the National Library were captured in photos that remind me of an afternoon orchestrated by the Master Himself. For once we had gotten on the bus to tour the East Coast, the driver took a liking to us and called out all the sites as we passed, entertaining us with little stories and chatting merrily along the way.
It seems as though there is nothing that I ask God for on the children’s behalf that is denied. “Many are the children of the barren woman,” the scripture says, and that might be applied to me since I have never given birth to children of my own. But I will tell you this: from the day that I started my fist teaching class in Barbados, I realized that I would love my students as if they were mine. Kids in Action is an extension of that love. Long may it live on after I am gone. May Jesus come for His Church and find us still serving children and serving Him.
