When Scot Bamburry landed a job as a stevedore at Kingston Wharves, the Wood Hall, Clarendon resident beamed with pride as he had finally got the chance to put his international shipping and logistics training to good use.

Bamburry, 39, had graduated from the Caribbean Maritime Institute in 2008 after completing a diploma programme there. However, it wasn’t until his struggles to land a logistics job was highlighted in this newspaper last May that the doors of shipping and logistics channels opened for him. After his story was published, Bamburry was offered a job as a stevedore, who loads or offloads cargo to and/or from a ship, at Newport Stevedoring Services Limited, a subsidiary of Kingston Wharves Limited (KWL).

“I am overwhelmed. I now start to see where my life is heading. It’s like I was blind and now I can see,” he told THE STAR last May.

However, in a cruel twist of fate, Bamburry is believed to have lost his life while performing his dream job. Kingston Wharves said that he fell overboard while performing stevedoring duties at the Port of Kingston on Tuesday night. The incident occurred about 10:05 while the vessel was docked at Berth 8. Up to press time yesterday, the search for Bamburry was ongoing.

The situation has sent shock waves throughout his family and his community of Wood Hall, where he has been labelled as a kind and easy-going person. The incident comes on the heels of the death of his mother, who passed on January 12.

“I don’t know what to say, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to begin,” his aunt, Veronica Rodney, told THE STAR via telephone from her home in Canada. “I was so happy for him when he got that job because I knew he had the potential. He had it in him and I was so overjoyed for him,” she said.

Rodney, recalling their last meaningful conversation, said he visited her while she was in Jamaica at her home in Wood Hall in February. She said that they sat in the kitchen and spoke about many things, including his job, which he told her was going well.

“I got up from my side of the table and I hugged him and I said, ‘You know what, this has been a long time coming, you have waited so long, struggled so hard for this job’,” she said.

According to the distraught aunt, Bamburry, who worked at a car wash in Wood Hall at the time of his first interview with THE STAR, had dreams of helping his community’s youth to achieve their fullest potential.

“He said he had plans to assist them, he didn’t go into specifics, just that he wanted to do something for them as they were struggling like himself,” Rodney recalled.

In Wood Hall, the mood was one of sadness. Mortel Pinnock, who owns and operates the car wash where Bamburry worked, said he was still trying to come to grips with the news.

“Everybody just sad,” he said.

Elisa Craig, a minister of religion and principal of Wood Hall Primary School, said Bamburry was on a mission to make the community proud.

“He said he would try his best to pull out some of the youths in the community who would have gone through the same thing that he had,” she said.