Welcome to Cultured Grenadian Girl

On 30th August 2021, I would deliver for the first time, a eulogy that I was tasked to write. It was a eulogy for my late cousin Avi, who died suddenly and unexpected on the 31st July 2021.

Avi was a blogger, YouTuber, singer and many more and when I launched my YouTube channel (Islander Living) at the start of 2021, she reached out about us collaborating.  A eulogy was far from what I was thinking the collab would be. Today 3 years later, after much changes, transitions, and healing, inspired by Avi and others in my life both living and gone (my grandparents and step-father), I’ve chosen to share my voice again.

Journal Entries of a Cultured Grenadian Girl!

This title has so many play on words. A blog that will be about culture and very biasedly Grenadian culture. I may seemingly lose my Grenadian stripes for the fact that I do not like breadnut and some other things, but otherwise I’ve been born, raised, live, and love this soil and the culture it has given me. My now inactive YouTube channel Islander Living: Callaloo conversation was intended to capture much of the content that this blog will have but since 2021, I’ve found that the writing comes easier than being on camera.

Another aspect of me is advocacy and empowerment and specifically related to lifestyle through business and finance education. They say your purpose is the thing that no matter how much you run from it, you keep finding your way back to it. Earlier in 2024, after sharing some tips on personal finance with a group of young people that I was mentoring, I ended up mentioning that I had a YouTube channel once upon a time to one of them, which sparked the question ‘what was it about?’. I paused in the realization that life had come full circle because I still ended up having the opportunity to share with others about personal finance and budgeting etc., which I planned to do on YouTube and didn’t.

Following a few more events of 2024, I would recognize that no matter how much I tried, advocacy was like a burning flame inside me that I couldn’t dampen. This blog is me fanning that flame again.

I am an accountant by profession and the former part of the blog title is homage to that. Journal entries are how records are made in bookkeeping (accounting). Adjusting journal entries, which happen to be my favourite, are how corrections are made to original entries that contain errors.

Back in 2018, I wrote a proposal for a project I wanted to undertake similar to this but I didn’t and rediscovered it one day within the last few months of sifting through my old files. The following was an exert I included in that proposal:

“From being the descendants of slaves, from people who’d been colonised, from people who’d been tossed aside, we suddenly became the controllers of our own destiny. For 400 years, our forebears were enslaved. We suffered in order to produce Europe’s wealth. After slavery we were further enslaved under colonialism. But in 1979, with our own ability, by our own efforts, we changed our course. Yes, others helped, but it was us.” (phone interview)

-Dennis Bartholomew, who during the period of the revolution was a representative of the People’s Revolutionary Government at the Grenadian High Commission in London, talks of the significance of the ‘revo’

https://invent-the-future.org/2014/03/legacy-of-the-grenadian-revolution

So here we are – my latest baby – Journal Entries of a Cultured Grenadian Girl. Let’s see where this journey takes us. Let’s share our own stories, be our own influencers, break silence, reclaim our voices and continue the revolution.