By David Williams, Freelance Writer
Maria Dunn and her daughter, Sasha Smith, are slowly overcoming the trauma of being hit by a stray bullet in their neighbourhood. The two say they aren't running away. - Winston Sill
THEY SHARE a scar not just a painful memory that lingers hauntingly in their minds, but a visible physical scar, marking where, within a fraction of a second, the same stray bullet hit them.
You can plainly see the penny-sized scar on Maria Dunn's inner right forearm. When her daughter, Sasha Smith, holds her arm as they go out walking, the scar at the tip of Sasha's left middle finger, meets the twin scar on her mother's arm.
It's little wonder, then, that Ms. Dunn and her daughter are as close as any mother and daughter can get. In fact, they're more like sisters. Ms. Dunn, 34, and 12-year-old Sasha, are slowly overcoming the trauma of the incident which happened one evening last year as they walked hand-in-hand along Grant's Pen Road in their neighbourhood. An inner-city community, Grant's Pen has been one of Kingston's trouble spots.
It hasn't stopped them from following their dreams.
A jobless, single mother, Ms. Dunn graduated from the H.E.A.R.T. Academy with certificates in sewing. Unable to find a job, she nearly gave up hope, but today, she can boast seven CXC passes, achieved in 1998 and 1999 on the strength of her daughter's encouragement. Now, she has applied to Shortwood Teachers' College to qualify as a teacher and hopes to be accepted for the new school year. Again, it was Sasha who gently nudged her mother to go after her goal.
"She always wanted to teach and she's very dedicated to whatever she puts her mind to. She always encourages me to aim for my goals and to do my best and I told her she should do the same", said the soft-spoken Ardenne High School first-form student.
"I have faith in her."
Ms. Dunn swears by the value of education and insists that her daughter puts school work before anything else in her life. And, the Jehovah's Witness hopes her own prayer to become a teacher will be answered soon.
"I want to educate as many people as I can, including people in the community, because education is key. Running away from the community isn't my first choice. Everything I do helps a lot in getting over the incident," Ms. Dunn explained.
She has being doing quite a bit. Not many unemployed, but qualified (seamstresses), single mothers would volunteer their time and energy, with no real promise of reward, for some 40 hours a week. But Ms. Dunn has been doing so for the last month at the Stella Maris Foundation on Grant's Pen Road where she helps with the sewing and just about anything else that needs to be done.
The Foundation tries to help her out where they can, she told The Gleaner.
"There's going to be a sale here later this month. I might get a 'smalls' afterwards, but they have to wait first and see how the sale goes," she shrugs with some uncertainty.
What both mother and daughter seem certain about is that they'll be able to make a better life for themselves. You can see it in the way they walk hand in hand, the way they talk to each other, the way they smile. It's a kind of reassuring, almost conspiratorial smile that tells you they share a secret that they've got what it takes to make their dreams cone true. Perhaps what it takes is each other.
