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Hailing from the community of Greenwich Estates of the garden parish, twenty four-year-old Ayoka Davis, Miss St. Ann Festival Queen, is on a mission to serving and improving the lives of people from the largest parish in Jamaica and, hopefully, beyond.

With a focus on youth, her project, Tallawah Helping Hands Youth-based Mental Health Foundation, “is geared towards inspiring lives and rebuilding futures with a target population of youth aged 12-19 years,” said Davis in an interview with Our Today.

The problem areas Davis hopes to address with her project are mental health concerns of youth in the parish as well as the issue of learning disabilities.

With the areas of focus identified, the Festival Queen of St. Ann said, “One objective of the project is to enhance the lives of youth by mentoring them to develop confidence, self discipline, and skills that will positively contribute to their psychological, physical and social development.”

“To be honest, when many people hear about mental health, they just think of a person classified as being mad. However, we are talking about persons who just came out of the stress of COVID-19, which for some people impacted how they think of themselves, how well they speak with others in the spaces they occupy, and the environmental factors that affect how they communicate,” she shared.

She added: “For example, many adults lost their jobs during the pandemic and they became angry and projected that onto others. As a result of that, many people in their environment, especially children tended to learn that behaviour and exhibit same. So, my drive is to work with children who fit that script and try to understand how those experiences impacted them and identify ways forward to help them.”

On the part of learning disabilities, she said that she recognises that children are often chastised for their “inability to grasp content as easily as others and in turn get classified as being dunce or stupid.”

Davis, who is also an educator at the Port Maria High and Preparatory School added, “I want to change that perspective. I want to let people understand that learning disabilities can prevent someone from learning at the same pace as others do.”

She revealed that the project went through an initial test run phase in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic by way of Zoom sessions and WhatsApp support groups where participants were assisted to cope with their mental health concerns.

“Now that COVID-19 is not that much a threat anymore, I want to see how well I can establish the project and include professionally trained persons such as psychiatrists, psychologists, doctors and even social workers to work with the youth,” she highlighted.

Davis holds a first degree in Psychology and Communication Studies from the Northern Caribbean University and hopes to utilise it to propel the Tallawah Helping Hands project.

Why enter the JCDC Festival Queen Competition?

Davis said that she entered the competition to help her unlock more of her true self as a leader and volunteer.

“For many years, I have watched and attended the competition. I have always loved how the young ladies were professional and very culturally aware. It was intriguing to me. Even though I’ve been in leadership and I’ve been volunteering in various ways, I needed to learn how to become my true self and not what everyone else wanted me to become. So, I felt like I needed to enter,” she said.

“St. Ann is known as the Garden Parish and also the home of the first capital of Jamaica. However, I want to further establish this beautiful parish beyond its tourism. Through my Tallawah Helping Hands platform, I want to do more community development work. It is also my hope to help those who struggle to make ends meet with donations in various forms. Many children have not gone back to school since the pandemic and it’s not necessarily that they don’t want to go back to school. In many cases, it is because they don’t have the financial resources to do so,” she shared.

“I hope to be able to reach out those persons using my platform to help help them break barriers and achieve their goals,” she added.

She shared that upon deciding to enter the competition, she did a total 180 on her life. “I changed how eat, I changed how I speak, how I present myself, and began practising.”

She expressed that even though she is not the best in terms of enunciation, she does her best and she pays close attention in all her sessions related to speech.

“Our coaches teach the basics of how to pronounce words correctly, how to sit, and how to stand. Even when I feel as though persons around me are laughing, I have learned how to carry myself like the confident and well poised woman that I am,” she shared.

Davis, who won two sectional prizes in the form of Miss Congenial and Best Performance, said she was shocked that she outshined a competitor who won four sectional prizes, including the Most Culturally Aware.

“For me to win over someone who won most culturally aware is very hard, but I did it,” she said.

From nothing to something

Davis told Our Today that she epitomises the saying, ‘from nothing to something’ in her unique way.

As the first in her family to complete high school and university among the best in her cohorts, she said that her achievements have come through hard work, consistent studying, and her faith.

“My family has never had that before. So, a curse was broken. I needed to use the Festival Queen platform to reach out to young ladies and tell them that they can achieve just like I did or even better than I have,” she said.

“I was considered as the nobody, the person who many thought would not make it, but throughout all that noise, I listened to the negativity and learned how to be strong in front of persons who put me down. I showed them them the better side of me as opposed to going tit for tat with them. I have always been respectful and heed to correction. That type of attitude has helped me throughout the competition. I just needed to remember where I’m from, who I am as a person and remind myself that hard work is the key,” she highlighted.

Davis, who comes from a single parent household has three siblings.

She credits her mother and a few persons in her extended family for the work they put in to ensuring that she could achieve success highlighting, “My mother has been the person who has worked very hard to make sure that we were okay.

She told Our Today that though the majority of her life has been in St. Ann, she spent a short while in St. Mary.

“Where I am from, I have been exposed to persons who have been abused and violence was a constant experience. There was a point where I realised that children were being sexually abused, and they didn’t even know that was happening to them. That’s one of the reasons I chose to study Psychology. I needed to get a platform to help people in similar situations. Additionally, I wanted to be a voice for them and that is why I have put my programme in place,” she noted, adding that she needed to be a voice for the voiceless.

“I want to be that person who advocates on their behalf while using my psychology and communication studies. In that same breath, I hope to venture into Law so that I can fuse my background as a teacher in media to shed light on these very real issues,” she said.

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