Barbara Jones Nelson

I did not plan to become a journalist, but it happened.

An unexpected and casual meeting with “a newspaperman” changed the direction of my professional life. That meeting put me in a place that allowed me to experience events and meet people that I would never have experienced or met otherwise.

Some events were awesome, historic and exhilarating; others were local, heartbreaking and depressing, but all were a part of the wonderful experience that is life.

I would like to share with you some of the experiences that I had – like meeting Queen Elizabeth 11; speaking with a man who, as a little boy, had stood with his mother and siblings in the hot sun for many hours outside the room from which they had been evicted; standing near to Cuba’s Fidel Castro; sitting next to Maurice Bishop, Grenada’s former Prime Minister; seeing the Concord airplane land at Montego Bay in Jamaica; laughing with Jamaica’s cultural icon Louise Bennett; watching Barak Obama speak in 2008 on the night prior to his election as the first black President of the United States of America.