By Damion Mitchell, Staff Reporter
Simone Hull - Carlington Wilmot /Freelance Photographer
From a little 'ghetto girl' whose dreams were often clouded by the struggles of life in a depressed inner-city community, Simone Hull has surmounted immeasurable degrees of despondency, discontentment, discouragement and distress.
THE 27-YEAR-OLD conqueror Simone Hull has overcome her challenges and is now the assistant manager of corporate communications at the Jamaica National Building Society (JNBS).
"It has been more than an uphill struggle but I have always been a person who is very determined at what I am going to do," a bright-eyed Simone told The Gleaner during an interview at her offices on Holborn Road in New Kingston recently.
As a teenager, she never enjoyed the privilege of privacy at the tenement yard in 'Southside', central Kingston where, along with her brother and mother, she called home. And punctuality at school meant that she had to compete among other tenants to use the bathroom in the yard first.
Her mother, a vendor, earned just enough to send the two children to school and to buy the essential items in the home. But, despite the physical and financial inadequacies, Simone said her mother never accepted indiscipline as a consequence of their misfortune.
ENCOURAGEMENT
According to her, this, coupled with the encouragement from her teachers at Alpha Academy, assisted her to rise from the quagmire. But of most significance was her desire to attain a better life, she said.
As the years went by, Simone said high school became more difficult as her mother did not have enough money to fund her education. And so at fourth form she acquired assistance from the Kingston Restoration Company (KRC) to defray tuition costs and to pay her Caribbean Examination Council (CXC) fees.
She knew that with this assistance, she had to work hard, and so between fourth and fifth forms she literally had to burn the midnight oil to study for her external exams when the flickering flame of a kerosene lamp was her only motivation.
"I had a very strong willpower and so whatever I had set my eyes on to achieve, I was going to do it," she said, and indeed the long nights of labour paid off at the end of each form when she successfully sat her CXC examinations and the end of sixth form when she passed four A'Level examinations.
By now Simone had been elected president of the KRC's Youth Education Support System and was deemed a model student.
At the age of 17 when she left high school, she acquired a job at the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (now Television Jamaica) as a production assistant and life began to bear blossoms. A year after her employment, she enrolled in a degree programme at the University of the West Indies (UWI) with the expectation to make proud her mother and the many other persons who had helped her.
CHALLENGES
But only months after her enrolment she got pregnant. Now, the "jelly was snatched from her donut" and she did not know how to regain the confidence of those who were depending on her.
"I was depressed because I was thinking that this should not have happened to me," she recalled.
But she resorted to the reservoir of inner strength and determination that she had developed over the years and continued to study until she had her baby. Two years after graduating with her degree, she managed to win back the love and confidence of many who thought she had failed them.
"My parents were devastated, the people from KRC were disappointed and I had to face the trials of being sick, but I had the drive to do it and that was what kept me going," she said.
RESILIENCE
Now, Simone sees herself as a role model for other persons who become pregnant while in school and her dream is to establish a facility to assist them. "I could have been just like one of those teenage girls who got pregnant, moving from one job to the other," she said, "but I was determined." She added that "it burns everyday to see parents just giving up on teenagers who are pregnant as if it is the end of the world."
The assistant manager, who still considers herself to be a 'ghetto girl', said that she still has a "dying allegiance" to Southside and that she often visits the community and shares with the children in the area.
A mother of two, Simone is now pursuing a Master's degree in Media and Communications at the University of the West Indies.
