Tragedy to triumph Former struggling nail tech now teaching skill to others

When Onique Bolton walks into a classroom to teach women how to turn nail technology into an income, she remembers the girl she once was – a teenage mother who had not finished high school, had little money, and was desperately searching for a way to build a different life.

Today, the nail educator and founder of the Builder Boss Nail Tour, says she has trained more than 100 women, with approximately 30 to 40 now earning from the skill across Jamaica. But, before Bolton could teach other women how to build, she had to repeatedly rebuild herself. Growing up in the March Pen Road area of St Catherine, Bolton recalled poverty, instability and violence. Her earliest memories include sharing two beds with several relatives in a small two-bedroom board house and surviving some mornings on tea and cream crackers.

“There are times there was like a miracle where I would go in the bush in front of a church and find one dollar or two dollar and we could a go buy 10-cent bulla,” she recalled. By age 10, violence had entered her life intimately when her paternal grandmother was shot dead.