On a bright, sunny Saturday morning, 18-year-old Jovan was setting up a Monopoly board on the porch of a small building shaded by a mango tree. At over six feet, he is tall and lean. I asked him who he would be playing with and he told me “No one,” and that some of the pieces were missing. He was just setting it up for fun, he said. Jovan is president of the Mountain View Youth Club. He just finished high school and hopes to be an entrepreneur who specializes in recycling. “I am a patriotic person,” he says. Jovan is also a poet. He likes Gabriel Okara and he writes his own pieces. In fact, he recently performed an original piece at the funeral of a 16-year-old boy who died of ackee poisoning. “I was so nervous,” he told me, “but people said they didn’t notice.”

Before Jovan came along, the Youth Club’s membership was stagnant. There are now 12 regular members and a vice-president. (Youth Clubs in Kingston’s inner cities are a common means of uniting the community, supporting youth and giving them healthy, meaningful activities to do with their free time.) The Youth Club hopes to capitalize on some land out behind the Homework Centre, where they will raise rabbits (and sell the meat to restaurants) and build a greenhouse. They are also looking for more shelves to house the books that are regularly donated.

We met Jovan at Mountain View’s Homework Centre, where we were also welcomed by Miss Ann, who is president of the community association. They are both leaders in the community, which has experienced violence and shootings in the past few years, and they both spoke of the challenges they face in bringing people together.

“We are working to get the full trust of the community,” Jovan says. YOU had previously spent several years in Mountain View, helping to unify residents, however, the project recently came to an end. So did the parenting classes, conflict resolution classes and events that brought people together. It is now up to people like Jovan and Ann to hold things together in neighbourhoods where grudges over geography, relationships and possessions easily smoulder until they erupt into fatalities. In fact, after the meeting with Ann and Jovan, myself and fellow staff member Cush were to meet someone from the neighbouring Rockfort, just a block away, but because this fellow had had conflict with someone in Mountain View years back, he could not walk into the community to meet us. We had to go to his turf. Apparently, the conflict had something to do with his baby mother and he showed us the result: two gunshot scars.

After meeting with this fellow, we also had to meet with two Dons (Pepsi and Popeye) to make sure that they would be on board with YOU working on their turf. (After hearing an extensive description of our plans, they endorsed YOU’s future presence). We then had to meet with Mr. Martin, who owns a community centre, out of which YOU will be running its newest program. In inner-city Kingston, buy-in from unofficial community leaders is paramount. Without buy-in from dons and other people of import, residents view outsiders with suspicion. It seems our trip this morning was successful, thankfully.

The reason for the trip to these communities today was twofold: The first is that YOU will soon be running a disaster-preparedness education program in Rockfort. The second reason was that this coming week, YOU will be welcoming students from Western Carolina University in the U.S. as part of their alternative spring break trip. We will take them into the communities of Mountain View and Hampstead Park so that they can meet residents and perform some community service. We held such an event last year and it was a great success. This morning, fellow YOU staff member Cush and I visited these communities (as well as Rockfort, where YOU will be implementing a new program soon) to do a site visit and finalize some details.