Malvern, St Elizabeth – For eight years, Sania Patrick has been working alongside other women in her village, weaving craft goods such as baskets, table mats and decorations from thatch and other indigenous products.

But as marketing manager for her group, the St Helena Women’s Group in Retrieve – a remote, wind-swept, small farming district on the south-western slopes of the Santa Cruz Mountains – Patrick was keenly aware that she needed to lift her communication and motivational skills.

“You will find the market (for the craft items) but then it’s hard to get the women to come out, lift themselves and make the effort,” said Patrick.

So it was then that Patrick recently jumped at the opportunity to attend the first meeting of the newly formed St Elizabeth Women (SEW) Ltd in Malvern in early September.

The SEW, which is founded by social activist and the former head of the Bureau of Women’s Affairs, Dr Glenda Simms, is a response to perceived “major social and economic stress” in traditionally “resourceful and resilient” St Elizabeth. In fact, gradual erosion of “the traditional values of decency, hard work, honesty, caring and sharing” at household and community levels is now being seen as a major problem in this south-western parish.

According to Simms, the new organisation is intended to “help women help themselves” out of poverty and ignorance and towards an improved standard of living. There is also an overall ambition for SEW to become an example worth following – not just across St Elizabeth but across the nation.

After that first meeting of about 20 women from mainly southern St Elizabeth representing all social stratas, Patrick had definitely not found all her answers. But she said she felt very encouraged.

“Those women have a lot of knowledge, experience and education and I feel I can learn from them,” Patrick told the Sunday Observer.

Judene Honeyghan, a young farmer and mother from Stanmore, just west of Malvern, also wants knowledge and new ideas but from a different angle. “Fertiliser get too expensive, I want to know how to use more organic stuff to grow my peanuts and gungo peas and so on,” she told the Sunday Observer. “I want to learn different things.” she added.

Improved parenting skills, environmental education, leadership training and the cost/benefits of bauxite mining were identified as among the issues communities in St Elizabeth must confront as matters of urgency.

Gloria Cover, who returned to Jamaica from Britain “feeling like a stranger” in 1995 after 37 years, believes groups like SEW can also play a role in helping to reintegrate returning residents.

And in bemoaning the tendency of women to take a back seat to men, Cynthia Hill, head of the Social Development Commission’s (SDC) Region Three (St Elizabeth, Manchester, Clarendon) told the Sunday Observer that leadership training at informal as well as formal levels would have to form part of the SEW’s work.

“. there has to be leadership in your own home, leadership in the community, leadership as a parent. A lot of our women are parents who don’t know how to parent . we have to train according to the gaps that we see but training is key for the group.,” she said.

The diverse expectations are sure to be extremely challenging but Simms, a “daughter of St Elizabeth” who hosted the inaugural meeting at her home in Malvern, was brimming with pride and hope.

“All the women were so enthusiastic, it’s just as if we have tapped into something that they were missing. I hope to get from this, a movement of empowered women across St Elizabeth to make sure that we are rooted back in community with the values that will put us forward,” she said.

She painted a picture of “empowered women” from the group developing ideas for “small, unique businesses that we don’t see anyplace else”. Even at that first meeting, claimed Simms, there were “about three or four ideas which could help women to become financially independent”. A part of the organisation’s mandate would be to locate funding to ensure that entrepreneurial ideas bore fruit, she said.

Simms said the founding members were “all committed to going back to their communities and forming what we call ‘pods of this organisation’. We want our symbol to be a tree – firmly rooted in the soil of St Elizabeth and everywhere they (members) go, they will form a pod named after something natural .”