A Bajan Sound Engineer and a British Corporate Banker?

A Bajan Sound Engineer and a British Corporate Banker met on a cruise while on holiday in Barbados, moved to London and the rest is history…kind of.

After a short stint in Croydon where I was born and raised for 7 years, attending the prestigious Croham Hurst Girls School and practicing piano. In true “My Family and Other Animals” fashion, my mum took the leap away from her corporate life in the UK, put little me on her back and off to the island of Barbados we went. This was a huge culture shock for me moving into a bungalow in the middle of the Atlantic leaving all my friends behind. Yet I was determined to assimilate, learning the National Anthem of Barbados and rehearsing the Pledge of Allegiance every morning before Assembly at school, going on trips to “The North” with my grandparents and eating traditional Sunday lunch on the weekends.

When I wasn’t shoving my hand in a bowl of rice to pick out pieces of salted pigtail, I was being grilled by the high-speed pressure cooker of Bajan primary school life. I did the Common Entrance exam in 2011 and went to The Lodge School, where I met a lot of friends and colleagues in the school band whom I still have my life interwoven with today.

Despite all my effort, I never really felt like I fit in, nor my potential shone through in that environment, and I transitioned out of public school to Lockerbie College where I began to donate most of my time to my true childhood passion, Science.

I enrolled in Physics, Chemistry, Biology and Principles of Business and I swear from these classes I discovered exactly who I want to be. I wrote articles on nanotechnology and its future in the biotechnology industry, and I was able to share my science backed business ideas with my business teacher every time we had class. Even better, I got to put all of this into practice. In 2015, when I was just 15, I became my school’s winner for the $20 Challenge, an initiative where business students receive a $20 capital investment to build their own business.

I created a small skincare business with the marketing point of including the plant, Aloe Barbedensis, a synonym of Aloe Vera. This was inspired by my trip to Seoul, South Korea that summer. Seeing all those korean skincare products use Aloe Vera that I knew had ties to Barbados, the country I was learning to love throughout my childhood made me know this island was particularly special for me.

It was where all my creativity, ideas and science led me back to. It was a huge part of who I was even when I wasn’t trying. Even when I wanted to push Barbados off me, that annoyingly hot sun that continued to bake down on me even on Christmas day was there pushing me to become who I am, after I recovered from the daily bout of heat stroke.

After going through my Cambridge international Sixth Form years and putting way too much mental energy into whether I should pack up back to England or stay in Bim, I pursued my undergraduate degree in Biochemistry at The University of The West Indies Cave Hill. Tuition was free, my friends and family were near, and I felt comfortable.

Biochemistry taught me what I thought was all I needed to know about the world. I learnt how every disease worked, the basis of every function in the body, every possible way a cell might signal, and it gave me the tools to use this foundation creatively. I met amazing Bajan professors who have written the most influential books on Barbadian plant species, professors who cared about the links between Diabetes and the African Diaspora post-slavery, people who wanted to make life make sense for people in the Caribbean and could walk the walk too.

I landed an internship at a wastewater company with contracts for hotels and businesses all over the island. This exposed me to even more parts of Barbados, who knew a small island could be hiding so much! I went on trips around the island collecting water samples from the west coast hotels, seeing the inner workings of places like Chef Foods Inc. and the Barbados Bottling Company and carrying out biochemical laboratory testing, analytics and building vast reports on their water quality. This internship soon led to becoming a call-in laboratory technician and then a full-time employee at the company, my first big girl job at 21 and in the field, I love the most. My bosses became my role models, Bajans building a sustainable company tackling climate and conservation issues head on and having it become such a success seemed like it was right in there in my grasp, a science backed business thriving in the island I love. 

I cherished my time as a laboratory technician; however, I soon grew to learn it wasn’t enough for me anymore. Putting all my time into the nitty gritty microscope life of science I forgot a large part of my happiness came from ideas, and the monotonous work wasn’t serving me. During these years I had so many ideas bursting within me with nowhere to go, I wanted to do something for Barbados; I wanted to be like my bosses, I wanted to sit at the big boy table having the conversations about saving the world.

I fell into my first business plan, a sustainable enterprise with many facets tackling energy, food security, local agri-tech and pharmaceuticals. Over time, I’ve joined a team of mostly old friends and some new, all from different walks of my journey so far with all special skills that’ll fit into my dream of helping Barbados become a regional leader in sustainability. This all leads me to today, now 24, I am standing on my own two feet trying to fight the fight in the climate crisis, and hopefully gain some grant funding, for an environmentally stable, safe and fruitful Barbados with the memories and experiences of growing up on this island helping me put one foot forward every day.