Peterborough Charity Helps Promote Change in Jamaica

More than 40 Years After First Visiting Jamaica, Columnist Pays a Return Visit

Rosemary Ganley
The Peterborough Examiner
December 26, 2019

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For 45 years Rosemary Ganley has been involved in development programs in Jamaica. Progress has been slow, but it has occurred and been a worthy journey. MATHEW MCCARTHY/FILE PHOTO

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Almost 45 years to the day of my first fateful arrival, I came to Jamaica again last month. It was "fateful," in that life and relationships there shaped my next five decades.

What a ride it has been for me, my family, Peterborough and points beyond. In 1975, I was a raw recruit in the world of international development, and in fact that term itself had only been in our lexicon since 1966, when Canadian labour leader Romeo Maione suggested we Canadians might want to help overseas causes and people.

That is still true. On a recent morning I was at Kenner Collegiate, a very special, warm and outward-looking high school, where students Eliana Schartner and Emma Poley led a two-hour Amnesty letter-writing session where 200 students and teachers wrote appeals for nine prisoners of conscience around the world, who are under 25 years of age, and for one Canadian cause, that of Grassy Narrows Reserve in northern Ontario where people wait for clean water.

Back in 1975, I was being led by my adventurous husband to take three little kids to the teeming and turbulent city of Kingston, Jamaica where he would teach accounting to young adults at the community college. I had never even had a black friend.
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