KINGSTON, Jamaica. By the time the sun is fully up over Kingston, Doreen Lillian Scarlett is already walking, a bundle of résumés under her arm, working her way from office to office across the Corporate Area.
The 35-year-old accounting student has been at it since July. She plans her routes by neighbourhood, covering Ripon Road, Oxford Road and Half-Way Tree together, then New Kingston, Hope Road and Trafalgar Road on another day. So far she has handed out or sent 135 résumés, on foot, online and by email. Four interviews followed. No offer has.
The money is running out. What she saved while employed years ago, and what she earns guiding the occasional visitor, is going on rent of more than J$20,000 a month, utilities and food. She budgets rent first, she says, and if she does not have to leave the house she stays in.
Her story has travelled online, and it is one of persistence shaped early. She grew up among vendors; her mother sold outside Camperdown High School for years with the young Scarlett beside her until dark. She finished Clan Carthy High with seven of eight subjects, sat mathematics at Dunoon Technical, went on to Excelsior Community College, where accounting became a passion rather than a subject, and spent two years at the University of Technology. A job at a financial institution followed.
Then her mother fell ill with diabetes and suffered a series of strokes before her death in 2019. Her father’s health failed soon after. Scarlett cared for them both and for a young niece while helping her brother through school, and her own studies and career stopped. She says now that she put everyone else first when she should have secured herself, and calls it the one error she made.
She is back at the University of the West Indies in her second year, with a master’s and a doctorate in accounting in her sights. Each morning she takes public transport in from Portmore, St Catherine, and starts walking again.
LRTVS News Desk
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