A week after Tessanne Chin made Jamaica proud by winning the popular NBC singing contest, The Voice, she is still moved by the support she received from Jamaicans and their overall reaction to her historic achievement.

“Never in my wildest dreams did I think there would be this reaction… such a reaction from Jamaica, the diaspora and everybody,” Chin told the weekly Jamaica Observer Monday Exchange yesterday.

“It has completely blown me away, and I feel like I have woken up in a bit of a dream. The overwhelming support that everyone has shown me has just blown me away… I don’t think words can do it justice,” she stated.

Chin related how, thanks to friends and family, she was being constantly kept up-to-date on the happenings in Jamaica while she was engaged in the gruelling competition in Los Angeles, California.

“My brother-in-law Wayne would call me and say ‘Yow, Tessie, you don’t understand what a gwaan down here’. I never expected it to be such a wonderful thing for all of us to share, but I felt it… I felt it all the way over there in that hotel room. Everywhere I was going I carried you guys with me and I thank you.”

With regard to the campaign run by Jamaicans to mobilise votes for her, Chin said: “It makes me think of how powerful we can be if we all come together. We must remember that power in everything we do… it moved me. I never thought in a million years that my entire country and the entire Caribbean would get together for me.”

Chin, who is home for the holidays, will perform locally for the first time at Shaggy & Friends — the charity show to benefit the Bustamante Hospital for Children — on January 4.