Afeya Jeffrey: Environmental Ambassador

KIERAN ANDREW KHAN

Afeya Jeffrey, Miss Earth Trinidad and Tobago 2018, is scheduled to travel to the Philippines this week, joining delegates from other nations who are doing far more in the areas such environmental protection and climate change mitigation. While representing the country with some major negative environmental challenges is not the only challenge for this pageant delegate, it’s just one of the many she would have overcome in her lifetime by the time she competes in the international leg of the competition.

“I grew up in Guapo, Point Fortin, which at the time for me was a pretty remote and depressed area,” she illustrated. “Pageants as a result have always been my way of not just getting past that but also using them as a platform to share my adversities and air my philosophies while also being able to influence and inspire the younger generation,” the self-confessed pageant junkie notes. But she doesn’t simply enter to further her own ambitions and self, but instead focuses on being an influencer to her generation – not the kind that lives in Instagram, but rather in the real world. Just recently she screened an animated film to children in her community for whom trips to the movies are a rarity.

After completing her BSc Environmental Studies and Natural Resource Management at the University of the West Indies, St Augustine, she later moved to Mona, Jamaica to pursue her interest in Physiotherapy after which she is due to begin her first working internship.

The decision to pursue her second field of study stemmed from an earlier injury she sustained while pursuing another craft she loved – dance. And dancing in itself was a liberation for her body and her spirit. “When I was 11 years old, I was very overweight; over 200 pounds. I simply would eat whenever I was offered and no one told me anything otherwise. My parents and grandparents would always offer food and I loved food so I would eat and I wasn’t very active,” she recalled.

“Around this time, a cousin of mine came to visit and she decided that she wanted to take walks in the evening, but not being familiar with the area, I would join her. One evening, a month or so into this, a shopkeeper who was well into his ’70’s called out to me ‘Aye, yuh losing weight girl!’ Up to this point, no one had ever said anything like this to me – so I started off pursuing fitness on a more serious level. I asked my dad to get me those instructional DVD’s in Tae Bo and other dance and fitness routines and I would just do it at home. I would even do Fit for Life when that was on TV too,” she recalled with a laugh.

Last November, Jeffrey started her own dance company and earlier this year a fitness company (STEP IT UP FITNESS TT). She developed a programme called under Healthy Youth Promotion Exercise (HYPE) that identifies obese or overweight students in primary schools and attempts to conform their lifestyles where nutrition and exercise are concerned.

“Once a year, we host a camp that challenges children to be more active and their parents to provide better nutrition. Caribbean people have a particular culture when it comes to food, so telling parents to substitute bread for lettuce in a sandwich takes a long time to change. But we have those parents that really see attitude and energy changes after the program which makes me happy. I know what it is like to be bullied and ostracised for being overweight, I wouldn’t want the same for anyone else!”

The biggest challenge lies ahead for this year’s representative to the international pageant. There have been financial considerations but one of her largest, is the nature of Trinidad and Tobago’s pursuit of a better future. “We have to change our habits – in terms of simple things like littering to bigger things like the fact that we are the second largest emitter of carbon dioxide per capita and have the third largest environmental footprint per capita. We have to realise contributions we make as a small island are significant – whether it is to worsening or mitigating climate change would be up to us to decide.”