Happy Emancipation Day: Jamaica is a country and we are also a community

Happy Emancipation Day:  Jamaica is a country and we are also a community

As we celebrate and reflect upon where we are coming from, it is also a great time to look forward and plan for the days, months and years ahead.  We are truly a blessed people who have seen challenges in our economic health, our social stability, political transparency and accountability, with natural disasters and of course we have been confronted with the lingering residue of our colonial past.

The ways in which we have dealt with our challenges has confounded and even impressed many outside observers, yet we do what we do because it is who we are. We are a creative people, who often look at our problems and call them opportunities, we have seen how our people come together during times of individual and collective challenges.

Jamaica is a country and we are also a community.

We have somehow found ways when it seems as though we were looking at dead ends. We have developed a true community based on the motto “Out of Many, One People.”  We are one people during good times and during times of challenges.

This emancipation day and all the days that follows, we are praying and working toward building a Jamaica that embraces our strength and learn from our failures. We are asking all Jamaicans to find the way… clear a path along the way so that others may get the chance of participating in the growth of Jamaica Land We Love.

Let us recognize that we are not a political party, nor are we a single color, we are a community. We are standing together, walking together, talking together and working together, not just on Emancipation Day but always.

Today we are celebrating our heroes, our history, our story that is unfolding and of course we are celebrating each other. We are saying this day though symbolic, lives in us and represents who we are and how we feel about each other. Let us move in unity, emancipate ourselves from mental slavery, recognize our beauty, help a stranger in the most uncommon way, reach out to a friend we have not heard from in days, weeks or even years, talk to a senior citizen and ask them about the days of their youth, sit with a child and talk about the future they envision. Yes friends let us come to together in unity and start a conversation about who we are, where we are coming from and most importantly where we are going.

May this Emancipation Day be your best one yet!

One Love

Bridges to Jamaica