NICHOLE MURRAY started a business with the intent of making a living, but has put that goal on the back-burner as she goes around doing voluntary work and social outreach.
Murray, a 33-year-old community practitioner and trained missionary, has dipped her hands into so many ventures that she decided to try to consolidate everything and build a company that can impact the Caribbean positively.
She started Merit International Company Limited in 2014 as the vehicle to achieve her dreams.
Through the Caribbean Christians Network (CCN), an arm of Merit, Murray undertook an almost year-long expedition to Guyana, where she helped many children in Parishara village in the Rupununi Savannah.
Murray said what she did in Guyana was to take CCN from concept to action. She said she was moved after hearing Guyana’s President David Granger, who was then leader of the opposition, speak in Barbados about how it pained his heart to see many children in his country’s remote interior going without school or basic supplies like shoes.
Murray got donations from several businesses here and shipped new shoes, uniforms, stockings, hair accessories and underwear to the children.
“They were waiting for the shoes for about four months so when they finally arrived it was like Christmas for them,” she said.
As fulfilling as the experience was, Murray said it also brought back the painful reality that Caribbean unity was not what it should be and “the wounds” between Guyana and Barbados still existed.
Bad treatment
“It grieves me that I cannot leave Barbados and go two hours away and feel at home . . . because I am Bajan, and because Bajans treated Guyanese bad before, now Guyanese feel all Bajans are the same,” she said. “I spent almost every day of my time in Guyana trying to defend Barbados to the point where I got sick of it and stopped.”
However, she said she had seen the resourcefulness of the Guyanese people and considered the country “a sleeping giant”.
Murray also plays a major role in the Caribbean Congress of Community Practitioners (CCCP), whose aim is to give a voice to community workers. She said the challenge most non-governmental organisations (NGO) faced was that well established groups got funding opportunities but not the people in communities who fed the needy and those who worked with children in community centres.
Therefore, the CCCP plans to bring community practitioners in the region together under one umbrella where they can raise their funds together, instead of in little pockets, and pool expertise.
As to her personal goals, top of her list is to see CCN become a multimedia company – Christian magazine, television and radio station – and a missionary training centre. She said the Caribbean
has millions of people and a large number identify themselves as Christians, but the challenge is that there is no Caribbean-wide media that is directly Christian.
Already she has a CCN YouTube channel which carries daily devotions and a weekly news round-up of regional issues.
The former Queen’s College student has done a rich variety of study programmes, including mass communication at the Barbados Community College, psychology at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, NGO management at the UWI Open Campus, Bible studies and mission at the US-based Bethany College of Missions, and make-up artistry with the Barbados Vocational Training Board.
She admitted that all these might seem disjointed but were all tied together to help her achieve what she had set out to do.
Speaking of her time at Bethany College, Murray said she worked with the chronically homeless, where at least three generation of a family or more are homeless.
However, she said when she started Merit over a year ago, she was intent on taking a break from community work to focus on business but that had not materialised as she fell back on her passion – people.
“I can say I have made a lot of mistakes when it comes to that balance, but my passion is people and so if somebody calls me, I drop everything and go take care of them,” Murray said.
Even through admitting that things are rough business-wise, her persona has not changed. She laughed as she acknowledged that she gets a huge amount of satisfaction from what she does.
“I am living my purpose,” she said. “A lot of what I do now is as a result of the process that God has taken me through. I was not in control of my parents break-up, my mother dying from cancer or our house being burnt down. The journey that I have taken have pretty much been set out for me.”
Murray said she felt very entrepreneurial and for a long time had avoided a full-time job. “I realise that if a phone call comes for me to go somewhere in Africa I am going to feel as if I lost out on an opportunity to help someone by being stuck behind a desk,” she said.
“I know what it is to be homeless, I know what it is to not have food, to lose my job, to be mother- and fatherless. I am now at a point where I wake up every morning looking forward to the day. I may go to sleep sad but I wake up ready to accomplish something,” Murray said.
She added that her name means the people’s victory and she believes in and lives it.
“I take my name very seriously; I believe I was born to pull people out of a place into a better place. I know what that place is because I’ve been in the worst of it so I am determined in the next few years to make people work together in the Caribbean and to see what for our forefathers was a concept that was possible somehow to see it come to past in my lifetime,” Murray said.
With her ever-resent chuckle, she said, “All I require is ten more hours in every day.”