WWW- World Heritage Project Day 1

Monday Dec. 14th 2009

I went to the World Heritage building on Spadina with a group of people from my school to work on an assignment the World Heritage Project gave us.
"You will listen to a woman's story and then portray it using different mediums of art."
That is when I met Joy. She's a 60+ woman originally from Kingston Jamaica. She became a Canadian citizen after her mother was employed by a Jewish family in Toronto (and they wanted to keep her for more than two years). Joy grew up and went to public school in Toronto and got a job as a dishwasher. As she got older, she studied law and was married twice and divorced, giving birth to eight boys, and they all lived together in Regent Park with her mother. Then she left her job in a clerk's office and got into a relationship with the wrong man. They travelled all over the US together and she later found out he was a drug dealer. Then one day he invited her to go to London with him, and she said yes, only to later be ditched by him in the airport when they landed. Security found drugs stashed in her bag and she was sentenced to eight years in prison in the U.K. The whole time, her children had no idea where she was. After three years of working hard and head chef in prison, the Canadian embassy finally found out where she was and she was brought back to Toronto. She later got a job at a restaurant and is currently head chef (<-Just a summary of her life).

Her youngest son, Clifford, was also there with her and has had a succesful career for someone who has grown up in Regent Park. He started his own record label company, which can be found on Youtube (tiltrocktv) and his band's name is Point Blank (a band made up his seven brothers - he produces the music) and was nominated for a Juno Award for his music video Born and Raised in the Ghetto.

The goal for the group was to listen to her (I filmed it) and we were to put something together to portray her life and raise awareness. So I decided to make a video using photos and clips of Toronto, clips from Joy's speech and her son's song Born and Raised in the Ghetto playing in the background. Work period on Tuesday.

- Weather was terrible, arrived home late and got in trouble. Haha.