Charity: A Bed For Ray-Marc, and Much More, From Shaggy and Friends

The Bustamante Hospital for Children, located near Kingston's National Stadium, is the only specialist paediatric hospital in the English Speaking Caribbean.


Its Intensive Care Unit has all of five beds.

Yes, 5. That's not a misprint.

Despite the resource shortfall, the hospital, like many, still works miracles on a daily basis. 

As it did for 10-year old Ray-Marc Robinson. Ray, a "normal" boy, fond of football and playing games on his phone reported vomiting, fever, and other unexplainable ailments, and that was only the beginning. Over the ensuing days, Ray would get dramatically worse, with his heart and lungs ceasing to function normally. It was an ordeal that wold last many days, and which would test the Christian faith of his parents - particularly his mother, Audrey Spence - to the extreme, as well as the skill an resolve of the medical staff.

But Ray's story has a happy ending, in large part to the initiative of the Shaggy Make A Difference Foundation, headed by global superstar Shaggy and his wife Rebecca. The pair, along with the super team of volunteers comprising the Shaggy and Friends Benefit production, provided ventilators to the Hospital, just one parcel of over 1000 pieces of equipment that the funds raised by the all-star musical event, held bi-annually since 2012.

One of those ventilators, assigned to the hospital's Intensive Care Unit, proved to be the critical difference, as related by Ms Spence and  head of the ICU, Dr Brian James.

Indeed, as Audrey Spence, inside the Hospital Conference Room for the media launch of the impending 2018 edition of the Shaggy  and Friends Show, recounted her "long night of the soul" in praying for, caring for and striving to keep faith for her son, her tears were matched, to some degree, by virtually everyone in the house, with a subdued yet relieved Ray-Marc at her side.

After the emotional testimonial, Shaggy stepped forward to remind audiences that this, indeed, was  what the show was about, and why the team puts a Herculean effort into every staging, primarily to encourage individuals and entities to give even more.

The ICU is the focal point of this edition with the posters and other promotional material bearing the tag line "ICU There at Shaggy and Friends" 

For the roughly 150 other youngsters like Ray-Marc, whom the Centre treats every year, there is hope that there will be even more happy endings after January 6, 2018, when the concert unfolds on the Jamaica House lawns, with the likes of Sting, hip-hop acts Wyclef Jean and Fetty Wap, reggae icons Third World and dancehall stalwarts Chakademus and Pliers, Ding Dong, Capleton, Wayne Wonder and Professor Nuts.