The project resonates with us on two important grounds. First, the scheme is likely to be of practical value to Jamaica. At the same time, it represents another effort to deal with the seeming aimlessness and sense of alienation among Jamaican youths.
As we understand the project, the aim is to form what is being called PERC (Preparedness Emergency Response Corps) as part of the broader programme to give heft to the efforts of the Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management. More than 900 people are to be trained to help in disaster management, recovery and rehabilitation efforts.
The PERC component though, targets as its members, young people attached to youth organisations, such as clubs, cadet corps, the National Youth Service and secondary schools. It was the first 100 of these young people, from an eventual cadre of 300, who graduated from their training last Thursday. They now have skills in areas such as first aid, basic disaster management, search and rescue and damage assessment.
Looked at another way, as Jamaica enters the hurricane season, when demand for disaster preparedness and emergency-management skills is usually at its highest, the country, hopefully, can count on at least 100 potential respondents with more than basic knowledge.
Transitioning for young people
Prime Minister Golding, as he indicated at the passing-out ceremony for the group, also sees the scheme as a part of a transitioning for young people; that they are being positioned to take greater responsibility in a society that is often distrustful of the young, who are often spoken of in the context of the society's weaknesses and failures. That is usually a conversation centred on criminality and violence, with a subtext of illiteracy and joblessness.
As narrow as that context may be, it is understandable. After all, of the more than 1,600 homicides that take place here each year, upwards of 80 per cent are committed by poorly educated males in their teens to very early 20s. It is the young, too, who, in a country with high levels of unemployment and underemployment, bear the brunt of joblessness.
In the 14-19 age group, for instance, when too many youngsters are, unfortunately, not in the education system, unemployment is around 40 per cent. It is 22 per cent for those in the 20-24 age group. This large cadre of unemployed and mainly unattached youth provides a pool from which they can be recruited into antisocial behaviour and even criminality.
The PERC initiative, it seems to us, provides one outlet for creative energies, and as Mr Golding suggests, the reduction of alienation and the building of self-worth. Young people have been offered another sphere through which they can actually do things and take responsibility in an organised fashion.
But the project, to us, is neither broad nor deep enough. It should embrace thousands rather than hundreds and, should, perhaps, be compulsory in schools, insisting on a range of community involvement - from solid-waste management to reforestation. We are, nonetheless, happy for the start.
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