In secondary school, Chelsea Ramjit, 22, was teased for being rambunctious and walking “like a boy”. Other cruel taunts came her way.
“They used to say I was the Hunchback of Notre Dame,” she recalled. “Back then I woulda take it on because you want to be cute, you want to be the hottest girl in your school. But now I really don’t care. This is the way I walk. I grew accustomed to it. And I like being like that. This is me. Nobody’s like Chelsea. Everybody has a special way how they walk and how they talk.”
Ramjit sat down recently with four other young women, finalists in the Always #LikeAGirllTT competition, which called for nominations from across T&T of young women who were doing impressive things with their lives. Two of them will be chosen, by a process of online voting and judges, to be ambassadors and mentors to girls around the country.
Their conversation was guided by Nicole Joseph-Chin, a businesswoman who also works to empower women and help them build networks with each other across the world. They discussed personal and professional challenges and why it was important for women to support and mentor each other.
Ramjit, a drama teacher and student, talked about the role one teacher played in her life.
“She saw something in me that nobody ever saw in me. She saw that I had the ability to make people laugh and to get attention from people. And that’s how I got into drama,” said Ramjit.
“She said, ‘I think you should get into theatre. You have that potential.’”
The teacher’s support was particularly important, since Ramjit lost her mother to cancer as a teenager.
“My first play at university, she was at the front row sitting,” Ramjit recalled. “She said something to me that always stays with me. She said, ‘You are given this life because you have the strength and ability to live it.’ ”
Scars don’t define you
Justine Low, 25, is an events co-ordinator who was severely burnt when she was eight months old. She was permanently scarred, losing a finger and all her hair.
“When I was in school I was bullied 24/7,” she said. “Still today I walk down the street and people would say something or they would stare. I kind of just learned not to take it on. I run on the assumption that people don’t know better.”
Some experiences have been harder to brush off than others.
“I went to (university) in Florida. I was out with my friends one night and this guy was drunk and he was, like, sticking a phone in my face: ‘Can I take a picture? Can I take a picture?’
“For months after that I was like, I don’t want to go out anymore, I don’t want to be in public too much, I don’t want to be in certain places.
“I am confident,” she said, “but every so often you get kicked down and you second guess yourself. But then you’re, like, no, that’s not my fault that they don’t know better.”
Fighting negativity
Selisa Jessamy, a 21-year-old special needs teacher from Tobago, said it’s only since living on her own that she started to care less about what people say about her.
“I would not say that I have confidence in myself. I really don’t,” she said. “People might say something. It might be ‘You know you’re fat.’ I’m bold. I would respond. ‘So me ain’t seeing that?’”
Chin interjected, “You find you are forced to be defensive most times? Have you ever approached it gently, like, ‘I’m fat and here’s why.’ Or ‘I’m fat and, you know something, these are the attributes of a fat person’? Sometimes you just have to embrace people’s negative perceptions and turn it into something positive.”
Giatri Lalla is a 21-year-old who founded an NGO to help poor children attend school. The challenge of raising money for such a worthy cause surprised her.
“You’re going with the perspective (that) this is to help people. Everybody’s going to want to help somebody. Everybody’s going to want to help a child.”
But Lalla said she encountered a lot “negative people”.
“And the main comment was: ‘I need for myself. Who’s going to give to me if I give to you?’” she said.
“That was the worst thing ever. That line could turn you off. That could stop you from wanting to carry forward. It was shocking. I know there were bad people, but I didn’t know it had so much. Some of them did come along after a while.”
Connecting through tech
Kandyss Trancoso, 25, uses computer technology to reach young people.
“Now that we are in the age of information and almost all the students have their smartphones at their fingertips, we are able to communicate with them and say, ‘Hey, instead of using this to bully people and share negative information, here’s how you can use this and become a contributor to the technology community,’” she said.
“We set up at office in Arima so the students can come and just chill, do some extra school work and build out their ideas. We realised the more they were building and contributing to that technology, the less they were using it for ill.
“Some students spend hours on their phones or on their computer doing absolutely nothing. Now when we were teaching them how to create a Facebook page, a website to share how well they and their friends are doing in sports, when they were doing that they spent less time on social media bullying each other.”
Chin explained what mentoring is and why it is important:
“We don’t all have the formulas. We don’t all have the answers. I didn’t become successful by just saying I want to do it,” she said. “The number of mentors that I have adopted along the way. I’m real boldface. I would just go up and say, ‘Your capacity to teach me is amazing, because this is what I need to learn.’
“We should all understand relationship building before we understand adopting a mentor,” she said.
“It’s not just about saying, ‘Well, you’re good at maths and I want you to teach me maths.’ It’s getting to know the other side of that person. It’s about their likes and dislikes, their challenges. Sometimes you might have an opportunity to mentor them. It’s really an exchange.”