By Pat Roxborough, Staff Reporter
WESTERN BUREAU:
A GRIM silence fell on the gathering of journalists, businessmen and health professionals as Wendy Chamberlaine's battered face filled the display screen in the ballroom of the Grand Barbados Beach Resort where the Pan American Health Organisation (PAHO) staged its eighth annual Caribbean Media Awards Ceremony.
"I told him I only had $20. He rammed the money down my throat as well as a part of his anatomy."
The audience understood perfectly, the American woman who has spent the last five years in Placencia, a small tourist village in Southern Belize.
And as the shocking words stumbled out of her crumpled face, the audience's silence gave way to gasps of a sort of horrified admiration of the woman who was brave enough to tell her story in such gory detail on national television.
There wasn't time to air the entire story as clips from all the winning entries had to be shown, but the excerpts made it hard enough for Denise Shepherd Simpson, who chaired the awards ceremony, to restore the spirit of gaiety that had characterised the function up to that point.
After the ceremony, several members of the audience flocked the author of the story, Dawn Sampson.
They wanted to know how she did it.
"Did that come on TV with her face and everything?" "Did you go out and find her?"
"Wasn't she reluctant to come on TV?"
Traumatised
by ordeal
The 24-year-old Belizian journalist, who spent two years of her secondary education in Jamaica at the Holy Childhood High School, could well understand the incredulity.
Most rape victims are so traumatised by their ordeal that they are reluctant to tell their story in a court of law where they are obliged to in order to ensure that the perpetrator is brought to justice. Yet this woman - who by the looks of it was in her late forties- was looking the television camera dead in the eye and explaining how her attacker beat and raped her.
It was earlier this year in March. Wendy Chamberlaine had just returned home from shopping. She hadn't locked her door she felt no need to since her village had up to that point been crime free unwittingly giving the rapist access to her home.
The part of story that did not make the video presentation was even more moving.
"The other part of the story was that this woman was afraid that she had caught HIV/AIDS from her attacker. She took her problem to the authorities and asked them to test the rapist for the virus, but they wouldn't out of respect for his human rights," Miss Sampson told The Sunday Gleaner.
Right now they're both waiting; Wendy Chamberlaine on the results of her own AIDS test and her alleged attacker on his trial which is expected to take place early next year.
Equally moving were the voices of the children that Jamaican journalist Erica James-King captured on tape.
The editor who put the clips of the winning entries together introduced the presentation with the sound of a child humming the Negro Spiritual, "Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen".
Escape challenges
of reality
As the voice of the eight year old girl that contracted AIDS from a rapist filled the room, silence fell on the audience again. Her concern for her siblings sounded like something that belonged in the mouth of an adult.
Yes she was happy that they loved her and wanted to stay home to support her through the difficult parts of her illness, but she wanted them to go to school and live a normal life too. Another child spoke about her mother's battle against the disease. She cried when she contemplated her mother's plight. "I feel as if I want to die too I love her so much I don't want to live without her," she explained in a broken voice.
Not all of the pieces were tear jerkers however.
Chuckles rippled through the room as the voice of Grenada's Francis Peters challenged a peer to take a drink and smoke some marijuana in order to prove his manhood and escape the challenges of reality respectively. Not that Peters trivialised the issue. A chilling image of death in black robes wielding a blinding scythe inserted at the end of the piece left no doubt in the viewers mind that drug abuse was a ominous issue.
The printed entries also helped to lighten the tone of the evening. Set against the background of some lively music, the enlarged printed features and animated pictures, the most memorable being that of a fat lady battling the bulge of obesity gave the audience occasion to smile.
Next year PAHO hopes to have even more clips to include in its video. Considering the slant towards mental health matters that the theme of the awards will take, it is likely that there will be some more grim images to contemplate.
