When Kerrie Baylis smiles, the only possible reaction to the parting of her lips, the dazzle of her teeth and the crinkle at the corner of her eyes is to smile in return and completely forget why you are there.
It would not be wise though to make any sudden moves because the new Jamzone queen is an ace with the gun and can drop birds out of the air from metres away. Just hours after besting other Caribbean beauties on Tuesday night, the new queen glows as The Scene sat down with her for an interview at the King’s Plaza Hotel in downtown Georgetown.
Back to guns.
“I shoot shotgun, I shoot skeet which people would never guess,” she smiles matter-of-factly before laughing. “I like the outdoors, I love animals, I love any kind of adventure or anything with an adrenaline rush.” In skeet shooting, the shooter attempts to break clay disks called clay pigeons as they fly through the air.
It is remarkably easy to talk with her. At 23, a tall, regal beauty, Kerrie has a refreshing outlook on life and her easy attitude masks the ambitious woman striving to become a business lawyer with the keen instinct of what she has to do to accomplish her goals.
“One word, just one, not even three?” she smiles dazzlingly when I asked her to use one word to describe herself. So of course I had to give in. Two! “I would use…” long pause “…fun-loving, I know that squinches up into one right, you have the hyphen in there…fun-loving and easy going,” she concludes charmingly. She does not mention smart though she should have.
When writing about beauty pageants it is best to avoid clichés but she merits them all. She represented Jamaica in the Miss World 2009 pageant in South Africa.
“How does it feel to be considered one of the most beautiful women in the world?”
She pauses and thinks. “It’s really an honour actually. I get quite bashful when people tell me that because when I look in the mirror I don’t see that,” she says adding that no matter how many times, she had heard the words, she does not consider herself beautiful. “So I get quite bashful but it’s really an honour to hear it, can’t get tired of hearing it right?” she laughs.
“Well, you are quite beautiful.”
“Thank you so much.”
Kerrie Baylis in a nutshell: “I love the outdoors, love life!” She also likes sushi and Chinese food while ox-tail is her favorite Jamaican dish. She thinks Guyana is amazing, Jamzone is fantastic and Georgetown is full of vibes.
She also knows to enjoy life. “I’m a very sociable person, so I love going out I love being with my friends, with my family and I love to eat so I’m always at a restaurant eating or dining out,” she says. She notes that Jamaica has lots of festivals like the Jazz Festival and who can resist when artistes like Celine Dion come to play. “I love those things, I’m always at that. I go out for drinks, you know I’m 23 so I’m always out in the town”.
But under the fun-loving demeanour is an ambitious woman striving to reach her goals. Kerrie recently graduated from the University of Surrey in the UK with a degree in law and plans to continue her studies soon and though she has not chosen her specialization yet, she has been taking courses on business law. She currently works as an insurance underwriter.
Kerrie was not much interested in pageantry, she reveals. Her friends pushed her to enter the Miss Jamaica World pageant in 2009 which she won. “That was my first pageant and I thought it would be my last as well,” she said adding that the lessons learnt were great. “I felt like I grew so much from it in terms of my personal development. It really teaches you how to come out of your shell. It kind of pushes you out of your comfort zone.”
She was pushed to enter the Jamzone pageant by the former Jamzone Queen, Lesa-Gayle Tom, also of Jamaica. A desire to see the country in addition to the cash prize was incentive enough.
And she has fallen in love; with Guyana. “Absolutely because I don’t know what it is, I mean I went to Trinidad earlier this year and visited a couple of the other islands but none that really captured me like Guyana. After being here for a just few days, I have found somewhere else I could live and I love Jamaica. I always swear I would never leave Jamaica but there’s something about the people especially that Jamaicans and the Guyanese seem to just connect. We seem to click and I love the spirit of the people. Everywhere I go, I hear Jamaican music playing so it has that kind of same… vibes I love!” she exclaims.
Pageant night was one to remember, not only because of the crown but the overwhelming support she received from the Guyanese crowd which has a reputation for being partisan most times.
Why do you think they fell in love with you?
“I don’t know, I think maybe it was my little dancehall thing that I did up on stage so it seemed they loved a little bit of the bad gyal style,” she says with a laugh. It is a side of Kerrie that bears exploring. “I really wanted to mix my culture with a little bit of me as well and I feel like that’s always the charm when you show yourself, when you show who you are and people embrace that,” she explains. The young beauty said that she felt she took a risk in her piece.
“…Especially when you’re in a pageant I feel like you’re almost expected to behave in a certain manner but I kind of wanted to leave an impression, I wanted it to be memorable, I wanted it to be something that was enjoyable, I wanted it to be something that was true to where I come from and our culture especially in terms of dancehall and then a little bit of me as well so whether it was received well or not I had to be true and I had to do it and I knew that it was gonna be interesting and since I’ve been here I know that the Guyanese people love Jamaican music. All I’ve heard on the radio is dancehall and reggae and even the old-school dancehall that you haven’t even heard back in Jamaica in a long time,” she said. “So I figured that, I figured since I got here that they have to love this, they have to.”
When Kerrie’s in it, she’s in it to win. “I was hoping…but I had to hear it before I believe it,” she recalled. The second of four children (she has an older sister, 27, and two younger brothers), she said that they are her biggest supporters. Her mother lives in England though and she misses her at times. “But I have daddy. Daddy is always there for me. I live at home in Jamaica with my dad. He has to step in as a pageant dad…so he always has to be with me” she said as she described traipsing up and down the house in her gowns, asking his opinion. “I have to get the approval from Daddy, which dress is okay, does this look okay, how’s my presentation…he’s always there for me.”
There are many sides to Kerrie but one can only try so much to prolong an interview with one of the most beautiful women in Guyana.
The fall after being crowned?
The newly crowned queen fell as the pageant wrapped up at the National Cultural Centre after a sheet covering the drop of the stage misled her into thinking she was on solid ground.
“The only thing that was damaged was I think my blood pressure shot up cos I almost had a heart attack when that happened but I’m fine,” she smiles.
“The judges fell for me and then I fell for them right”. Her laughter sparkles.
She recalled that the unexpected moment. “I know the shock that I felt as I was going down, it felt like it was happening in slow motion for me,” she said recalling the gasp as she realized she was falling. “But you know, sometimes that happens, you fall, you just gotta get back up, right,” she says philosophically and laughs again.
Back to guns and shooting birds. Kerrie says that during the bird bush season in Jamaica, “you have a set amount of birds that you can shoot, that you can bag and the afterwards you have a big cook-up over the birds and eat.”
And is she a good shot?
Smiles. “Yea, I’m not too bad actually. I have a pretty good aim actually.”
Hitting the birds in the air? “I can hit them anywhere from 50 feet to 100 feet or more.”
Have you ever thought of joining the police force? Being a sniper or something?
“Have I ever thought of that?” Laughs. “Nooooo.”
(i.sutherland3000@gmail.com)
