Robert Buddan Much of the talk about the long-term benefits of Cricket World Cup (CWC) centres on the economic gains and that is understandable. However, there is a civic value, more difficult to measure, but nonetheless important to the legacy of CWC as well. This civic value is the reawakened spirit of voluntarism, particularly in making the country cleaner, safer, more orderly, organised, and friendlier to Jamaicans and visitors. What is becoming evident is that some of these groups of volunteers intend to continue working at their projects well beyond the cricket festival and this is where the legacy would lie.
Both voluntary and professional contributions to civic life have the value of developing pride, experience, cooperation, and teamwork in a range of activities from clean-up campaigns to traffic management, security, and customer service. These are forms of social capital that have a value separate from economic capital and which, in fact, are essential for making politics, economy, and community life more successful.
Organising for the World Cup has produced new and important examples of civic voluntarism. The Hope 2007 group, representing a number of Christians, embarked on its Cricket World Cup clean-up campaign in the Corporate Area and Falmouth last weekend and will continue its efforts this weekend. It deserves special support because of the remarkably misplaced criticism it has received from one quarter. But support for the campaign has been overwhelming.
IMPORTANCE OF CLEAN-UP CAMPAIGN
While some have tried to politicise the World Cup and others to Christianise it, the importance of the clean-up campaign is really the civic-mindedness that people have demonstrated to make Jamaica a presentable place for visitors and the world that will be looking on. We wish the group the best as it spreads out from Kingston and St. Andrew to the other parishes and thank the KSAC and the Ministry of Local Government for their organisational and financial support.
There are three world cup legacies to come from this campaign. Each church is being asked to take responsibility for its surrounding area in order for the campaign to be islandwide. This idea seeks to take advantage of the often-quoted statement that Jamaica has the highest number of churches per population in the world. The implied religiosity of the Jamaican people is not always evident in peace, love, and happiness. The Hope 2007 group intends to make this network of churches count for cleanliness, at least.
The second legacy is that the Hope Group plans to continue its campaign beyond the World Cup and so make it sustainable. The statement that 'cleanliness is next to godliness' is particularly important in our environmental age and should lead to the development of environmental citizenship. It is towards occasions like these that our environmental groups can do more than just lobby. They can come out and do some hard labour as well.
The third legacy is that the Ministry of Local Government has given the Hope 2007 group $2 million to purchase cleaning implements, which will become property of the churches to enable them to sustain their campaign in times of natural disasters like hurricanes and floods when people need to be mobilised to clean gullies, cut trees, reinforce buildings and so on. In short, the Hope 2007 group's campaign will dovetail into disaster prevention and management as an ongoing service to the islandwide communities of church members and people as a whole.
PROFESSIONALS AS CIVIC PLAYERS
The church is a non-profit organisation motivated by faith and social conscience. Professional groups can also be motivated by social responsibility to practise voluntarism as well. In this sense, we must thank the 200 health professionals who have volunteered their services for the Cricket World Cup, representing the private and public sectors, and the 400 who came forward to offer service. We welcome the efforts of the emergency, disaster, management and special services of the Ministry of Health and Dr. Marion Bullock Ducasse for putting this all together.
I do not know if Dr. Ducasse has a permanent list of health professionals who can be called on in the future to give such services for other international and national business, sporting, or cultural events, or in case of outbreaks of disease, or whenever natural disasters strike and create a health risk. It might be worthwhile to have such persons on standby and it would give comfort to know that a ready and rapid response health team is at the country's disposal when the occasion calls. It would make sense to do this to create another legacy of CWC for the long term.
We are also happy that the New Kingston Civic Association and the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association are working to make New Kingston cleaner and more pedestrian-friendly in time for the World Cup. Rachel Gore of the NKCA is doing a necessary job and one that she says will continue after the cricket tournament too. The money from the Tourism Enhancement Fund of the Ministry of Tourism, Entertainment and Culture is good support.
We are pleased, too, that some 2,000 volunteers responded to the call from the Local Organising Committee to work in the opening ceremony and the tournament to follow and that HEART Trust/NTA has supplied experienced trainers for them. As Pauline Nelson of the LOC said, this training will be a legacy for other national and international events and for improving our skills in customer relations. We wish the 2,000 or so persons training for the opening show, the hope that they will give us the best show in the history of the tournament.
GLOBALISING SOCIAL CAPITAL
There will be hundreds of people in immigration, transportation, security, and road traffic, who will be at work to see that things run smoothly and safely and whose professional and commercial responsibilities require that they put politics and religion aside for a celebration of cricket that is designed to make the World Cup just that for people around the world.
All of this training, the experience gained, the new skills developed, and the value of voluntarism, will be with us forever. It is important that the different public and private organisations keep registries of the persons who will have this experience and training to utilise the value over and over again. One of the special qualities of social capital is that, while money can be spent and used for private gain, social skills last for a longer time to the benefit of an entire nation.
In fact, people from all over the world, some of who do not get along well, might benefit from the Caribbean example of living together. After all, CWC will bring Hindus, Muslims, Christians and others here from a great variety of cultures and political systems that are often at odds with each other. The Caribbean has an opportunity to demonstrate to the world that people of different races, classes, and religions can get along successfully and nothing demonstrates that better than our multinational West Indies cricket team. Those people would then be able to take away a lasting legacy of Cricket World Cup of their own. Those who look at monetary costs and benefits alone have a very narrow view of what makes societies work.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, Mona, UWI. Email: Robert.Buddan@uwimona.edu.jm.
