By Gretchen Keiser

Last year Ferdinand Mahfood walked through the gates of a Jamaican "poor house," called Eventide Home, for the first time.

He said later that it took him three days to get over his first sight of what is pictured here. He saw some 700 to 800 people, seemingly forgotten by all the world, who live as human discards in a universe defined by "sickness, suffering, poverty and degradation."

In an overwhelmingly poor country, they live in a government-operated home which the government cannot provide with minimal care or supplies. The sick lie untended and undressed; retarded children are tied with cloth straps to beds and flies collect on the weak and dying.

Victims all, they are still being victimized in this place as vandals rip out government-installed plumbing at the home and thugs come to rape women residents and then return them to the unprotected confines of Eventide Home.

They are poor and naked and hungry.

And the sight sparked in Mahfood, not hopelessness, but the realization that it was going to take more than one man's resources to affect the dire poverty and suffering he had seen.

Mahfood came to Atlanta recently to speak about the conditions at Eventide -- and throughout Jamaica and Haiti -- where priests and sisters struggle against enormous poverty without the resources and supplies they need to help their people. He puts it more simply, saying that he has come "to beg for the poor" and to help people become aware of the unmet and drastic needs of their brothers and sisters on these two Caribbean islands.

A Jamaican by birth, and a member of a wealthy Jamaican family, Mahfood came to the United States 10 years ago and settled in Florida, where he and one of his four brothers run an import-export firm. He was a successful man, living, he says, by his own rules. Then, some six years ago, as he was reading a book called Something More by Catherine Marshall on a plane flight between Florida and Chicago, the force of the Holy Spirit came into his life. He felt called to attend daily Mass and in his return to the Church, he was drawn especially to a love of the poor.

Though he is now a citizen of the United States, it was in his homeland of Jamaica that he found his service to the poor. Discovering the great needs of priests working among the poor in Jamaica, he is now supporting seven. In addition, the resources of the import-export firm, Essex Exports, Inc., have been used to ship materials and supplies to poor parishes and missions at no cost.

For some people, that might have been the end of the story. But in this case, it is another beginning.

The visits led him to Father Richard HoLung, a Jesuit who had begun work among the people of Eventide with the help of a small number of seminarians. Following his visit to Eventide, Mahfood began to turn from simply relying on his own resources to "begging" others to join him, aware that there was more than he could do alone.

In the Eventides of these islands, people from 100 years old to infants are "literally left there until they die," he said. In that one home "there are 700 to 800 people who live really worse than an animal would live in the United States." In a Third World country like Jamaica, where 80-90 percent of the people live in poverty, the residents of Eventide are "the bottom of the pile." Mahfood believes that most Americans have never seen this type of poverty and that some who are aware of it really don't want to see it.

"Poor means they have nothing. Poor in Jamaica or in Haiti means they are jobless," he said. "Being jobless means there is no hope. When you're unemployed, you either beg or you steal."

Yet against this bleak description Mahfood sits in utter certainty that something can be done and that hope for these people is more than a dim possibility -- it s a Gospel call. "To say that the problem is so great there is nothing we can do is to say that God doesn't exists," Mahfood said.

As a result of his first visit to Eventide, he formed a tax-exempt charitable trust known as Food for the Poor, Inc., which he envisions as becoming a link between American people and parishes and those in Jamaica and Haiti.

First written about this February in Miami's diocesan paper, The Voice, Food for the Poor, Inc., has since been able to send seven truckloads of materials, clothing, food and hospital supplies to the poor in Jamaica and Haiti. In Jamaica, the story of Eventide emerged in the local papers, at first prompting officials and embarrassment, Mahfood said, and then a pledge to move the home's residents to better quarters in a renovated hotel.

And the work of Food for the Poor reached the attention of some in Atlanta, including Deacon Jorge Gonzalez and Father Jose Fernandez-Solis of Immaculate Heart of Mary parish. Both have visited Jamaica to view the poverty of Eventide and other areas that Food for the Poor aims to help and are now working to bring awareness of the situation and Food for the Poor to the attention of people in the Atlanta area.

The support that Food for the Poor receives, whether it be food, clothing, medical supplies or direct donations, is channeled through Catholic Relief Services to the particular priests who are working with the poor, Mahfood said. This method is designed not just to assist the poor but to minister to the priests working in the Third World, he said. "In doing that, you are uplifting these men who have to contend with this poverty 365 days of the year."