PMI celebrates successful interventions
DUHANEY PARK, Mountain View Avenue, August Town – these Kingston communities have one thing in common. They are former conflict hot spots that have been touched by the Peace Management Initiative (PMI). Having laboured in these tough neighbourhoods, the PMI is confidently celebrating its successful interventions, Fourth Floor learnt during recent discussions about violence and its accompanying grief and pain. The PMI is a community-based approach to conflict resolution. An initiative of the Ministry of National Security, the PMI has been working at the grassroots level to reduce violence and bring peace to fractured communities since 2002. Today, the PMI also works in St Catherine, Clarendon, St James and Hanover.
When the PMI enters a community in conflict, it goes in with a cadre of experts, such as social workers, violence interrupters, psychiatrists, psychologist, nurses, ministers of religion, and data analysts. Its work is also supported by a dedicated band of volunteers from within communities, as well as international agencies.
Berthlyn Plummer, a PMI member, has seen grief upfront and close. Many of these faces are forever etched in her mind. She has heard their stories of heartbreak over and over.
“I relive this one many times,” she told Fourth Floor participants. It happened one Saturday morning when four persons were killed in Mountain View.
When the killers came, a child ran under the bed. Her mother and other family members also sought refuge under the bed. Her mother was shot to death.
“When we were doing the debriefing with her, she said how she was under the bed and when she lifted her mother’s arm, it fell back and the black blood was just oozing out. She saw the killer’s shoes with the white jeans on. She didn’t see the face, but the person stood by the bedside.”
Scarred by the memory of brutality, eventually this young girl resorted to seeking comfort in hard drugs and she is now dead – another life shattered by community violence.