This Little Light Of Mine: Addena’ s Substack January Newsletter

This Little Light of Mine: Addena’s Substack

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This Little Light of Mine is a monthly newsletter about my thoughts, new writing, readings, workshops and interviews with the artists and community movers and shakers that inspire me.

This Little Light Of Mine: Addena’s January Newsletter

This Little Light of Mine: Addena’s January Newsletter “Put your mask on First”

Addena Sumter-Freitag

Feb 01, 2026

Welcome Everyone and thank you for joining me and checking out this month’s Newsletter. It’s late, but I made it!

I honestly appreciate all of you Subscribers that stick with me, through thick and thin, and I want to give a welcome to anyone who is new.

Thanks for reading This Little Light of Mine: Addena’s Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Well now that January is over, I’m wondering… How did this month go for all of you?

Were you feeling like me? Did you (at times) think you didn’t know if you could survive the depressing headlines and news and videos coming at you from around the world?

So many things seem coming at us from so many angles and directions. It felt like there was no relief. As a result, I found myself stress-eating,

and binge-eating, and watching stupid TV shows to purposely avoiding watching the news. None of those things picked up my spirits for long though.

(However, I made some great food, like fabulous “everything pizzas” and roasted duck pancakes, with roasted potatoes, buttered brown sugar turnips and baked garlic)

I cooked and ate a lot! Finally, I decided I had to do something positive for myself - so I joined the Parkinson Community Centre and hit the gym every day in order to get some positive energy flowing through me. It worked

I felt like I was finally getting back my balance after being thrown for a loop from going through all the stress, sadness, and terror from hurricane Melissa who hit our Family and friends In Jamaica and turned their lives upside down.

Like everyone ( I’m sure) I was trying so hard to protect my heart and Spirit from breaking from the destruction and despair Melissa caused.

You know me. Usually I’m so happy and positive that some of my family makes fun of me and calls me Pollyanna.

However, the last couple of months I had to consciously make myself try to stay positive and hopeful and take comfort in knowing that my husband, Irvin and I were trying to do everything in our power to help those who needed our help, and not feel guilty that we couldn’t help more people (because everyone needed help).

Speaking of help, so many people gave help and aid to Jamaica. Friends of ours who live there (and over the last 35 years have become Family) had serious flooding and major damage done to their homes and small businesses from the hurricane, but they spent the last months focusing on helping others.

Soon after that, they began getting donation money sent to them and they were buying and delivering food and water daily to seniors and Families in their community and in outlying communities.

Many local hotel owners, and small businesses helped get aid for their staff and for the communities.

The “One Love Brigade” got donations and supplied, food, house repairs, and are even building back a new school for one community.

Big Ups to Debbie Lightheart and all the Negril Spay Neuter Clinic volunteers ♥️♥️ who took in, and took care of all the stray/homeless animals and the animals injured and in distress from the aftermath of hurricane Melissa.

For as much as I talk, I can’t put into words how proud I am of our friends that still had to go to work at the big an All Inclusive hotels right after the hurricane hit. All those hotels had generators and they had power and water, so they still stayed open for tourists. The hotel staff workers had to slog through the water and mud that flooded the streets in their neighbourhoods in order get to work everyday. They had to slip, and slide, and make their way over the potholed and mud filled neighbourhood roads while being hyper-careful to avoid getting injured from: broken glass (from blown out windows), broken pieces and sharp shards of tin that had ripped off damaged roofs, etc. There was debris and fallen trees scattered along the roads.

Those staff/workers still had to find a way to get to work even though not a lot of taxis were operating. They knew that they still had to work their shifts even though taxis were scarce because there were hardly any tourists and gas was also very scarce and very expensive, so drivers reasoned: “why waste gas riding up and down the road looking for a fare” … plus, roads were washed out and potholed badly in many areas.

To make it even harder on the staff that had to go to work, they had to worry all shift because they had to leave their kids and all their family at home with no water or electricity. (Don’t forget there was no power or water for months. *Some outlying communities still don’t have power and water restored)

After work at their hotel jobs, they all had to make their way home down the main roads and down the side roads in the dark. All the power lines were down so no street lights on any streets! Bravo to them!

💖💖. I also want to pay special tribute and honour our friends who had to worry about their families at home but still Volunteered and worked for World Aid Kitchen.

World Aid Kitchen cooked and provided 1,500 meals per day for people in the community. Many people had no livable homes, or had no way to cook with no power and no water … for months!

Part of The One Love Brigades donations were small tents, large family tents, and lots of tarps to cover damaged roofs and blown out windows. The Negril Rotary Club of Negril, and the Negril Chamber of Commerce, the Jahjah foundation also helped and donated food and supplies, clothing, and medical supples to the communities after hurricane Melissa. As well, there was countless private donors from Negril, West End, Red-Ground, Sav La Mar, Little London, and the U.S. and Canada.

I want to end by Shining a Little Light on “Throp”.

(Winthrop Wellington) “Throp” is one of the sons of Winston Wellington, the founder of Travellers beach resort. He and his brothers are now the joint owners of his father, Winston’s Travellers Beach Resort in Negril.

Throp’s Father, Winston Wellington, (pictured in the middle) lives by The Rotary creed: Services before Self”.

Winston founded the Negril Education Environment Trust ( N.E.E.T ) to address the need for the country’s educational support and resources. The organization combines partnerships and donors to provide programs that have encouraged and helped countless youth. They provide books, tablets, and computers, and have built 17 libraries across the country.

N.E.E.T. has also awarded youth with funds to get higher education.

You can check out amazing programs yourself:

neetja.com

Now back to Throp Wellington:

Throp gave us some of first video reports of Hurricane Melissa. He documented the Hurricane from the time it was first hitting Negril.

At that time he gave us a video report from outside the family’s Travellers Beach Resort hotel to show us the winds and the waves and the damage the winds was doing to the trees around the property, and then he had to go inside for shelter and safety.

Throp gave us some of the first video reports of the damage to Negril and the outlying communities as he drove through them. He had to manoeuvre through the fallen electrical poles and wires and the debris from damaged buildings, fallen trees, and blown off roofs, and collapsed and washed out roads as he was documenting what was happening in real time.

He helped hurricane relief by joining, coordinating, and organizing relief projects and Go Fund Me donations, and he is still doing that work.

Thank you Throp. 💖 We salute you.

Cooking with Love

I told you I did a lot of cooking this month ….yeah and a lot of eating. Yikes! But seriously, cooking is really therapeutic. You actually get a kind of Zen feeling as you put your energy into cutting, and chopping, and preparing, and creating. You’ll find as your mixing, and stirring, and adding a sprinkle of this, a dash of that, and a couple of shakes of this, that you’re actually infusing love into your creation. People can taste that Love.

Speaking of love, I have a longtime friend, Twyla in Calgary that was hosting a dinner party that she wanted me to help cater. She wanted to serve my ribs with my famous Spicy Honey Garlic sauce in the main course. I never give out my recipe to anyone! I will make it for them and give them a jar but never the recipe. The reason for this is that someday Irv and I planned to open up a Takeout or get a Food Cart and only serve only 2 items: Spare ribs, and chicken. Both items served with my special spicy honey garlic sauce. So… Twyla made a privacy/ Non Disclosure pact, and I gave her all the ingredients to go and buy, and over the next two days we Video-called the various stages of preparation, from prep, to cooking stages, to glazing and grilling.

It was actually funny, because I never measure the ingredients. I just “eye them” when she was asking me how much of this to put in, and how much of that to put in? and I’d say: just take the jar and add: shake shake shake shake shake shake shake. Our take the jar and pour out swishhhhhhhh. It was a riot! We laughed our faces off!

She and her guests loved the Ribs the night of the dinner. She said they raved about how unique the sauce was. Plus… bonus! she had leftover sauce to use another night on grilled chicken when she had a friend over who didn’t eat pork. They loved the Spicy Honey Garlic sauce too. (That sauce is like the hot sauce in the commercial where the old lady says “I love that sauce. I put that s*** on everything!”

My reason for telling you all that story is because I want to encourage you all, in this up coming month, to :

Try cooking with Love

Be good to yourself

Concentrate on self-care.

Be selfish

…and remember the instructions you are given when you’re on a plane “ you need to put your mask on before you can help anybody else.

So…. I leave you with this advise:

Be good to yourself,

And Get Busy Living.

Coming in February:

Cabaret, theatre, and dance.

A One Women biographical musical by Tamish Harris

(also coming to the Okanagan Valley,Trail, Oliver, Golden)

Check out all the Events in your cities for February .

See you at the end of February ♥️♥️

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