Melaine Walker on tackling violence

Olympic 400m hurdles champion Melaine Walker may be one of the world’s leading athletes but the Jamaican believes she has a key role to play in helping curtail her nation’s spiralling crime rate. Read her story – the first in a series of four stories where spikesmag.com finds out more about a athletes who make a difference.

It says much about Melaine Walker that moments after landing the Olympic 400m hurdles gold medal in Beijing her immediate post-race comments focused on the people of her homeland rather than her own personal glory.

“Stop crime and build back every ghetto place in the country,” said Walker in the wake of her Olympic success. “Jamaica is a small place and we can all live together in unity.”

Yet Walker’s concern was understandable. Last year alone more than 1500 people were murdered in Jamaica, a nation of just 2.7 million people, and the Olympic gold medallist was determined to use her success as a springboard to greater peace and unity in her violence-ravaged nation.

Walker, the youngest of six children, was brought up in Rose Town, one of Kingston’s most notorious ghettos dominated by ‘garrison politics', in which criminal gangs were linked by political parties. The neighbourhood is divided by a no-man’s land of wild bush, occupied by a disused shop, which acts as makeshift morgue where gangs dump the bodies of their victims for the authorities to take away.

Walker conceded life was tough growing up in Rose Town, where crime is a way of life for many.

“I didn’t see much violence because I usually stayed in but we would always hear of someone that had died,” she explained. “The most I would probably see was a fight or a stabbing or a robbery... it would bring tears to my eyes.”

Walker no longer lives in the volatile Maxfied Avenue community where she grew up, yet a visit back there before the Beijing Olympic Games prompted her to help contribute towards the much needed social regeneration in the neighbourhood.

“I became a little bit afraid because new people came up who probably didn’t know me,” she said. “I was a little bit scared things had got a little worse, so I was thinking after the Olympics if I can do something to help, just a little, I will. That is where I’m from and I want to make it like it used to be. Although there was violence [in the past] people usually came out together and would play music, but it wasn’t like that when I went back.”

So Walker, who now lives in uptown Kingston, set about launching a series of parties in Rose Town under her name to raise money to help restore a youth club in the area.

“Whatever was sold at the party, drinks or whatever and whatever profit was made from the night we put that money towards the youth club,” she explained. “After that the youth club started to develop.”

The Olympic champion also plans to plough her own money into a number of schools in the neighbourhood, which are badly lacking in basic facilities and are in desperate need of an upgrade, and she would also be seeking sponsors to help fund her plans.

And although, sadly, violence continues to be an everyday problem across Jamaica there is little denying that Jamaica’s track and field success at the Beijing Olympics had a hugely positive influence across the nation.

For the two weeks of the Games, crime rates across the island tumbled as the nation celebrated Jamaica’s 11 track and field medals.

And according to Jamaica Observer reporter Kayon Raynor the athletes can play a key role as positive role models.

“When you come from a community and you see someone who grew up in circumstances how you grew up and see them excelling at the highest level at sports, that is always a positive thing,” explained Raynor. “I’m sure that the likes of Shelly-Ann Fraser and Melaine Walker will have an impact and stop some youngsters from getting into crime. I’m sure it will have an impact but how much is quite a big question.”

For Walker she hopes to simply continue her work and use her name as Olympic champion and play her part in arresting the social decay in her homeland.

“I know that Jamaica is a wonderful country, it’s beautiful and the only problem that seems to hinder it is the violence, everything else is good,” she explained. “If I can help fix that just a little then I have to work on that.”