BY LUKE DOUGLAS Career & Education writer,
Jamaica Observer, Sunday, August 01, 2010
WHEN Coleen Dyer was deported to Jamaica from the United Kingdom in 2004, she felt her life had hit rock bottom. But on July 28, the 33-year-old mother of four was feeling good about herself again.
Armed with a certificate from the HEART/NTA Garmex Academy, [...]

BY PETRE WILLIAMS-RAYNOR
Jamaica Observer, Sunday, August 01, 2010
AT 43 years old, Rosemarie has experienced unimaginable misery. Still, she refuses to lose hope.
In the last decade alone, she was imprisoned for trafficking cocaine, gone close to death’s door, due in part to depression, and known what it is like to be homeless.As though that were not enough, [...]

by Olga Heaven, The Weekly Gleaner (UK ), 18/04/01
At the moment there are over 350 Jamaican women in UK prisons, 60 per cent of the foreign national women currently held here, mostly for smuggling drugs into the country. Despite harsh sentences of up to 15 years the women keep coming in ever-greater numbers.
Most of these [...]

by Olga Heaven 25/09/02  The Weekly Gleaner ( U.K. )
The media in Europe and America have the habit of making their citizens think that Jamaica is a war zone which is a grave danger. The ‘documentary’ featuring Kingston Public Hospital   shown   here   on prime time, for example, was like the American sitcom Mash without [...]

IT’s not an everyday occurrence to sit with someone whose work involves strengthening the minds and bodies of Jamaican women at a time when they need it the most. Olga Heaven, director and founding member of the Hibiscus Foundation, has reached out to Jamaican women serving time in prisons in the United Kingdom and has [...]

By Micheal Oban
THE recently held drug smuggling conference in Kingston, Jamaica has been welcomed by all parties concerned and is being seen as a positive first step in tackling the dramatic upsurge in Jamaicans, particularly women, who are being caught and sentenced for drug smug­gling into the UK.
The conference, held at the Hilton Hotel in [...]

BACKGROUND
The location for the second conference on Foreign National Women in UK Prisons is Jamaica, the Caribbean island of approximately eleven thousand square kilometres, with a population of 2.7 million, a median age of 26 years, of whom 30% are under fourteen. Despite its reputation as a paradise island, Jamaica is home to high levels [...]

The Female Prisoner’s Welfare Project–Hibiscus Jamaica Ltd was established in 1993. Its mandate is to provide the United Kingdom Judicial System with information regarding the socio–economic status of Jamaican women incarcerated for drug trafficking offences. The Agency also supports the resettlement, reintegration and rehabilitation of the women upon their return to the Jamaica.FPWP-Hibiscus Jamaica also [...]