By Rita McInerney

“To build a kingdom of justice and peace, God’s kingdom, we must become more aware of the conditions of the poor…”
Kingston, Jamaica
Archbishop Samuel J. Carter, S.J.
Pentecost, 1987

Jamaica is a lovely Caribbean island in the sun for its affluent residents and its free-spending visitors. For 70 percent of its population of more than two million who live below the poverty line, it’s a bare existence clouded by inadequate housing, joblessness, poor health care and education facilities.

Early in April, a group of priests and lay persons connected with Catholic press in the United States was given an up-close look at the distressing poverty under which so many are forced to live in this island nation where the top 10 percent of the population controls close to 50 percent of all income.

The journalists and photographers traveled to Jamaica under the auspices of Food for the Poor, (FFP) an international non-profit organization headquartered in Pomano Beach, Fla. Since it was begun in 1982 by Ferdinand G. Mahfood, FFP has shipped over $59 million in goods to clergy, sisters and ministers serving the poor, abandoned, sick and aged in Jamaica, Haiti and other islands of the Caribbean.

We met for the first time on Sunday evening, April 2. Father Norman Muckerman, SccR., editor of Ligourian magazine, celebrates Mass at the head of a long conference table. After the simple liturgy, Mahfood explains what FFP means to him.

The secret of the Gospel for him, he says, is universal charity. “The Church desperately needs to break out of being national-church of a diocese, church of a parish. We have to be Church to the world. We don’t profess Christ too much in how we care for the poor.”

The Sunday collection in a West Kingston parish, he says, is often no more than $10 Jamaican dollars (less than two American dollars). “Lots of priests do not have beds to sleep in.” His organization remedies that lack whenever they learn of such a need.

The FFP founder is a native of Jamaica, of Lebanese ancestry, who owns with his three brothers a large export-import business there. They pay him a salary equal to their own which allows him to devote all his time to Food for the Poor, a calling he sees as the “Fruit of his prayer life and relationship with God.” Through the family business he is able to purchase goods and equipment worldwide at low cost and house the firm’s shipping facilities.

Helping to make it easier for priests, sisters and ministers to cope in Jamaican ministries is as much a part of FFP as is the shipping of $2.2 million in emergency supplies after Hurricane Gilbert struck the island on Sept. 12, 1988. Regularly, food, mattresses, clothing, hospital and medical supplies, school books and furniture, galvanized zinc, lumber, plywood, sewing machines, agricultural tools, musical instruments, religious articles, motors and innumerable other materials are shipped duty free to Jamaica. Last year, the agency sent 465 trailer loads of goods and 41 vehicles to the Caribbean.

Early Monday morning we’re on our way to Mustard Seed, a three-tiered ministry in one of the many slums of Kingston. Our bus is comfortable, independently owned by a Jamaican man, who will be with us during the next three days. He weaves in and out of the chaotic traffic of vehicles, people and animals on the narrow roads with a bravery based on years of experience.

By 8:30 a.m., the crowds waiting for buses to take them to their low-paying jobs have thinned out. Nevertheless, the buses, privately owned and built to hold about 25 or 30 people, are packed with patient Jamaicans.

In our air-conditioned bus the slums enclose us just as they isolate their inhabitants from the nearby world of well-dressed people and luxury in Kingston. Old men, young men, women with babies in arms, roosters, goats, emaciated dogs, populate the narrow lanes. High fences of rusty zinc separate shacks made of debris lumber, cardboard, castoff zinc sheets, for the noisy road. These “homes” are to sleep in; the rest of life is lived in the privacy of the tiny outdoor spaces screened by the ramshackle fences.

In the Whitewing slum, Father Gregory Ramkissoon, a Jamaican of Indian ancestry, is a presence of hope to many. His Mustard Seed Ministry is a haven for 50 children with physical and metal handicaps, unwanted old people, pregnant women, young men anxious to learn a trade. Children crowd around us as we walk inside the courtyard of the complex. Hands reach out to grab skirts, to tug at camera straps. Boys wearing tan shirts and pants speak to us in guttural sounds.

Father Gregory knows he cannot solve all of the problems of Jamaica. So he has taken a “little corner and is trying to make a symbolic presence.” And the presence of the wounded children, he believes, makes the whole community “softer. They are cornerstone rejected which became the living stone.”

On a roofed porch toddlers are under the care of several women. They gaze up at us mutely - wide-eyed children abandoned by mothers unable to cope with physical disabilities or minds that will never understand even with the loving care offered at Mustard Seed. Babies, some badly misshapen, lie motionless on the floor pallets. Mosquito netting protects them from buzzing flies.

Food for the Poor gave him substantial help, the pleasant-faced Father Gregory says, when he began fund-raising to build his Whitewing mission. An earlier home for abandoned children was destroyed in a firebombing. Fortunately, no children lost their lives.

Along with the shelter, Mustard Seed’s economic projects aim to provide training and jobs in an area where unemployment is about 67 percent.

A Seed factory manufactures hurricane-proof blocks used to build small houses for the poor. A ceramics studio awaits the arrival of a kiln to resume operations knocked out by Hurricane Gilbert. A chicken farm, also ruined in the hurricane, will shortly provide eggs, income and innovatively, fuel, from the chicken droppings, for a gas plant. A bakery produces bread and sweet buns.

Before we begin our tour of Mustard Seed, each of us is given a “blessing” by Warren, a mentally handicapped boy of about 11. We sit in a straight wooden chair facing him as he places his hand atop head, touches eyes and lips and chest, all the while intoning a prayer with the solemnity of a bishop. After each blessing he returns glasses to eyes bright with unshed tears and accepts a hug. Father Gregory and Ferdy Mahfood smile with pride and joy in this young boy who shares his God-given gift with us.

During the few crowded days we spend in Kingston there will be other fleeting moments when grace touches us with its unexplainable mystery and beauty.

Father Gregory talks to us about his work with the outcasts, Food for the Poor’s assistance, and our responsibility to inform U.S. Catholics about the harshness of poverty in Jamaica.

“The bottom line for Mustard Seed is spreading the word of God” to the poor, he says. There is “no romance” in working with them. “They’re selfish, good and bad, just as we have in the corridors of power,” he admits with candor born of close relationship.

But the poor are open to Christ, he says, and Food for the Poor makes his evangelizing of them much easier. He can pick up his phone, the only one in Whitewing, and get ceramic equipment that would cost $14,000 U.S. dollars from the organization. Or a car, an extension of his arms and legs. “Priests, nuns, non-Catholics,” he says, “can call Ferdy and get whatever (they need) right away,” FFP and Mustard Seed “are two sides of the one coin,” the former material, the latter spiritual.

The body of Christ, he believes, resides in the bread we share with the poor. “We need you,” he told us, as “our representatives of the poor in America. When we share bread we become beggars for the poor.”

Before we leave Whitewing, we tour, under the protection of several young men from Mustard Seed, Bell Rock, a complex of dilapidated two-story apartments built by the government after a 1952 hurricane. On the second-floor gallery, two women squat in front of small basin, hand-scrubbing clothes in the dirt. Clusters of flowers bloom in unexpected places. A woman cleans fish under the shade of a tree.

A crudely printed wooden sign threatens a fine if anyone dares to steal any of the vegetables growing in a small plot fenced in by a haphazard wall of zinc and cast-off wood. Wilfred, 26, one of Father Gregory’s general helpers, tells us the thriving garden is the work of four young brothers who attend the nearby primary school.

Wilfred, not married but already the father of six children, has been working with the priest for three years. “We always call upon him,” he says. Because of Father Gregory the people in Bell Rock were able to survive the hurricane. And he has given them expectations of “a good income someday,” Wilfred says.

Father Anthony Struzynski, a Franciscan from New York, greets us at our next stop, Our Lady of the Angels parish. We are here to visit a sewing project which trains young girls for jobs in factories and in small cooperatives.

The priest says the project is helping the students develop skills their fullest human potential. The needs, he adds, are “extremely great.”

Mrs. Audrey McKenzie, project director, says as many as 35 start the one-year program. Between 18 and 23 complete the training. Four classes have been graduated so far. Some of the young women are working at a basic wage of $90 Jamaican dollars ($16.00 U.S.) each week.

The majority of Jamaicans, Mrs. McKenzie says, work at unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. There is a need for “at least another 100 such projects in this neighborhood.”

Food for the Poor, she says, supplies the industrial sewing machines the young women use. Each would cost $1,500 in Jamaican currency but FFP is able to purchase them in Taiwan for $60.

The chancery from which Archbishop Carter, the first native Jamaican bishop, conducts the affairs of the Kingston archdiocese, is a modest building. Nearby is his official residence, an old island style house said to be sparsely furnished with ancient furniture as befits a prelate who earns about $15 dollars a week in American dollars.

We meet him in the conference room. After introductions, he asks us to “do what we can to interpret our situation back home.”

About the “spawning of so many children, generation after generation,” he says natural family planning is being tried with married couples and there are “signs of hope” that patterns are changing.

Many were made jobless by Gilbert, he says, With help from the states, including Food for the Poor, the archdiocese was able to help people get zinc to replace roofs, and give out food and bedding.

The archdiocesan social development commission, using the strategy of the U.S. bishops’ Campaign for Human Development, the archbishop says, is aiding in the rehabilitation of families hurt by the hurricane.

Food for the Poor’s helping role, he says, goes back several years, when rising oil prices harshly affected an already failing economy and food shortages were acute. Its ministry now is crucial to many priests whose parishes can’t support them, the archbishop adds.

Archbishop Carter, who has led the archdiocese since 1970, says his greatest challenge is to make the people realize that the church is theirs, that it doesn’t belong to the mission societies who have been a needed presence on the island for such a long time.

The archbishop, who prepared for his priesthood in Boston, believes Third World countries have much to offer the Church. “Our liturgies are alive.” About 10 percent of the Jamaican population of over two million is Catholic. The island’s two dioceses are Kingston and Montego Bay.

One way the archbishop is hoping to bring a new model of church in his archdiocese is through a 10-year pastoral plan implemented in 1982 after a task force spent two years developing it. It calls for consultation and participation among priests, Religious and laity working together as the people of God to build up Christian community.

He is hopeful for the pastoral plan. “You look at what you have and then dream,” the articulate archbishop comments as the meeting ends.

Our last visit of the day is to the Golden Age Home, a government facility in the Vineyardtown area. Mavis Comstock is the nurse who supervises the care of 56 indigents senior citizens and mentally retarded men and women in this complex sponsored by Food for the Poor.

She leads us through the buildings around the square commons area. Inmates lie on cots and in cribs in the small rooms. She has a personal word for most but lingers at one crib to coax a radiant smile from a small girl with matchstick arms and legs and an overly large head. We can only gaze in wonder at this unmistakable expression of love between nurse and the young woman in the child’s body.

A second article about the pilgrimage to Jamaica will appear next week. Anyone interested can contact Food for the Poor, Inc., at Department 1372, 1301 W. Copans Road, Pomano Beach, Fla., 33064.