Jesse Ramdeo

jesse.ramdeo@cnc3.co.tt

A Trinida­di­an-born ed­u­ca­tor has copped a pres­ti­gious award from the Queen of the Nether­lands for lead­ing an ini­tia­tive aimed at Caribbean youth re­silience.

Back in June, mem­bers of her team at Ex­per­tise Cen­tre Ed­u­ca­tion Care out in Sa­ba, a tiny Dutch is­land in the Less­er An­tilles, land­ed in win­ners row for their project aimed at fos­ter­ing an in­clu­sive so­ci­ety.

Dur­ing a zoom in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Rayann Ramdin-Joseph ex­plained her jour­ney in the com­pe­ti­tion.

She said, “We’ve re­ceived this award, it’s called an Ap­pelt­jes Van Oran­je award, we re­ceived it from the Queen of the Nether­lands, Queen Max­i­ma. Each year there is a spe­cif­ic so­cial theme, this year the theme was men­tal strength and this award was giv­en to three dif­fer­ent or­gan­i­sa­tions out of near­ly three hun­dred.”

The Ap­pelt­jes van Oran­je is a year­ly award rec­og­niz­ing and re­ward­ing three ini­tia­tives that suc­cess­ful­ly con­nect dif­fer­ent groups or that con­tribute to peo­ple be­ing able to par­tic­i­pate in so­ci­ety again.

Out of the com­pe­ti­tion came a burn­ing de­sire to con­vert the win­ning piece in­to a work­book aimed at as­sist­ing chil­dren dis­ad­van­taged in more ways than one.

“The book deals with the ba­sic skills of re­silience that each child should be able to de­vel­op, such as iden­ti­fy­ing a sup­port sys­tem, pos­i­tive af­fir­ma­tions, self-care, mind­ful­ness, iden­ti­fy­ing feel­ings and emo­tions as well as deal­ing with feel­ings and emo­tions just the abil­i­ty to bounce back af­ter some­thing dif­fi­cult has oc­curred in their life.”

Ramdin-Joseph ex­plained that far too long men­tal health has been placed on the back burn­er, es­pe­cial­ly in Trinidad and To­ba­go, she added that men­tal con­di­tions have al­so been erod­ed by the pan­dem­ic and was hope­ful the work­book would be able to bridge gaps widened by COVID 19.

She said, “It is re­al­ly for them to re­mem­ber that con­nec­tion they have with the out­side world, with the coun­try, with the Caribbean and al­so geared to be ac­ces­si­ble wher­ev­er they are you al­ways have ac­cess to a book, you may not have ac­cess to a com­put­er but you can’t go wrong with a phys­i­cal book.”

“Sol­id as a rock” is avail­able on Ama­zon and places the spot­light on har­ness­ing the strength of the Caribbean youth.