Starting From Scratch In Rural Jamaica
Our Journey As A Homeschooling Family & Remote Entrepreneurs
I am Makeda, a wife and mother of two living in rural Jamaica and embracing a path of remote business building. I am a stay-at-home, homeschooling mother who is also committed to tending to daily home chores to do my part in upkeeping my family. My husband is a self-initiated subsistence farmer, originating from St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. We moved to Jamaica, my home country, from America in 2020 with the intention of co-creating a more sustainable lifestyle. We found that we could not sustain ourselves in America nor did we want to remain there to build our family.
Life in Jamaica has come with its fair share of challenges. Specifically, due to us being remote entrepreneurs and digital nomads, having no consistent contracted stream of income and in the process of building our businesses from the ground up, we face many financial restrictions. Still, because of our faith and a higher vision of a lifestyle that is more allowing of a balanced way of living for our family and especially as black people, we remain in Jamaica, committed to doing the work to build our ideal lifestyle.
Our daily life revolves around the upkeep of our family and land. Presently, living in rural Jamaica and having access to land, we are practicing subsistence farming. However, owing to a lack of farming equipment and being self-taught, it is a slow process. Daily maintenance requires a lot of time and effort, owing to us living in a low infrastructural environment. We live in a one-room dwelling on property with no running water or septic system. As such, daily my husband walks to fetch water from a community pipe, and I ration our daily supply for tasks such as washing, cleaning, and cooking.
I spend my days balancing my duties around the home, teaching and tending to my children, and pursuing my digital business ventures. I manage my family's social media platforms and serve as the creative director behind our content. Still, daily, I find that much of my time and energy are usually invested in cooking and cleaning, but I am striving to strike a balance between tending to my family responsibilities and career-building endeavors.
Despite all our limitations, we still perceive life in rural Jamaica as a blessing. It does test our ability to adapt and persevere amidst low socioeconomic living conditions, but we are learning many necessary life skills along the way. As parents, and especially after experiencing a season of financial downturns, we are always thinking ahead and working to improve our plans and preparations for 'rainy days,' and this keeps us in a mode of pursuit, always seeking to expand our chances of finding opportunities.
Having access to technology, living in rural Jamaica is an underrated blessing, in my opinion. Though building digital businesses is not a simple process and one's personal life circumstances will affect the flow of the process, just being able to plant a seed in the digital realm with the intention and possibility of it growing to reap financial gains is a privilege that my parents and grandparents did not have living in rural Jamaica.
Despite any of the challenges we encounter and are consciously confronting as a homeschooling family of remote entrepreneurs, starting from scratch in rural Jamaica, I am grateful for this opportunity to experience a bit of the lifestyle my ancestors lived and invoke some modern magic of technology and digital creativity into our lifestyle.