By Gretchen Keiser

Two years ago Ferdinand Mahfood was a businessman who had begun using the export company owned by his family as the base for a new project – a charitable work he called Food for the Poor.

By the end of 1983 he has seen Food for the Poor mushroom into a program that is sending nearly as much material out of the country as Essex Exports, the family business that gave it a start.

So far this year, from the Pompano Beach, Florida office of Food for the Poor, 55 trailer-sized containers have been shipped to the islands of Jamaica, Haiti and Dominica in the Caribbean, carrying everything from rosaries, altar cloths and vestments to pianos, mattresses and blankets, food and clothes. Mahfood, a native of Jamaica who immigrated to the United States more than 10 years ago, estimates that what has been sent so far this year amounts to more than two million dollars in goods. He hopes to be sending that amount of goods again to the islands before Christmas comes and the year 1983 draws to an end.

This amount of material, gathered from different parts of the country or purchased in Florida through the financial contributions of Food for the Poor supporters, is a quantum leap beyond the 23 shipments that went out to Jamaica and Haiti in the first nine months of Food for the Poor’s operation in 1982. And Mahfood acknowledges that he “never could imagine something could develop this quickly, this fast.”

Yet those figures seem to be, for him, the background rather than the foreground. He talks first not about what Food for the Poor has accomplished by way of help to the poor on these islands, but about the daily suffering he knows to be the life of the poor. And he admits to great frustration over what he sees as the lack of response by many in the American church to the plight of the poor.

While Food for the Poor began primarily as a source of aid to his homeland of Jamaica, Mahfood, a Catholic layman, says that he has been drawn increasingly to work in Haiti during 1983 because the poverty is even greater there. Speaking of his most recent trip there in early November, he described a rural area where people live in huts with mud floors so small that family members must sleep in shifts, some moving outside in the middle of the night to make room for the others.

He described the humility of a Canadian missionary sister, Sister Noella Gagne, who needed $400 to buy thread, materials and implements to start a sewing class in the area where she works. But who was reluctant to even press her request in the midst of what she thought were the “important things” Mahfood had to worry about. When he heard through another of her need and told her that Food for the Poor would provide the $400, her eyes filled with tears, Mahfood said, and she said, “God is very good.”

“This woman treats the poor as if she were talking to Jesus Himself,” he said.

Over the past two years, in addition to seeking contributions to Food for the Poor and arranging for the shipment of goods through often paralyzingly slow bureaucracies, Mahfood has taken several small groups of people to Jamaica and Haiti to witness the poverty of the Third World for themselves. Among those to travel with him in 1983 was Father Basil Pennington, who has since written a number of articles about the work of Food for the Poor with missionaries in Haiti.

As a result of this national attention, a Brooklyn, N.Y. parish has pledged 10 percent of its collections to the work of Food for the Poor, Mahfood said. Another parish in Madison, Wisconsin sent $21,000. “There are some very generous people in this country,” he acknowledged.

Yet he also said he sees “a lack of concern amongst the clergy, where pastors generally feel, ‘This is my parish. I’m going to run it for my people,’” without feeling an intimate connection with the needs of the larger Church.

Mahfood has always emphasized the need for the Church in the United States to be linked to companion parishes of the Church in the Third World, in order to have the opportunity to use its resources, wherewithal and wealth to serve the very poor. He doesn’t see this as a side program in a parish, but as a central part of the Gospel call. “Anytime we think about our church and their church, about us and them, we have a problem,” he said.

Right now, he is trying to set up a number of hunger projects between parishes in the United States and parishes in Jamaica and Haiti, where the sponsoring parish would adopt a sister parish and provide money monthly for a food program in the adoptive parish. One such project already underway is supplying $300 a month to a country parish in Jamaica where a Jesuit priest, Father Louis Grenier, is using the money to feed children in seven basic schools, Mahfood said.

He is looking for U.S. parishes willing to take part in such a program on an ongoing basis.

His hope is that Food for the Poor will be a living bridge “from God’s people to God’s people” building up the Church in Jamaica and Haiti by helping those in need through the hands of missionary priests and sisters.

In turn, by serving the poor, one meets people whose reliance on God is total, he observed. “We’re so dependent on creating our own salvation,” he said. “They must say, ‘God help me’ all day, every day, seven days a week.”

(More information on Food for the Poor may be obtained by writing to Ferdinand Mahfood at 1301 W. Copans Road, Pompano Beach, Florida 33064).