By Rita McInerney

All the beautiful people are not found at the expensive beach resorts on Jamaica. Beautiful people are worshipping in churches, playing in school yards, waiting for buses, sharing their faith in homes for the disabled, the aged.

These are some of the memorable Jamaicans encountered when 19 Catholic journalists experienced a Food for the Poor (FFP) pilgrimage to Kingston, capital city of the Caribbean island nation April 2 to 5.

Our host, Ferdinand G. Mahfood, native of Jamaica, started the interdenominational non-profit charity in 1982 after visiting poorhouse, “Eventide,” in Kingston. From that start, the organization has become a link which enables people of the affluent world to help those in the Caribbean Third World.

Tuesday, our second day in Kingston’s slums, begins early as our bus takes us through mean neighborhoods to St. Patrick’s Church in Waterhouse. A congregation of mostly older women, a few men and younger adults welcome us with joyful singing of “Reach Out and Touch The Lord.”

One hymn of praise rolls into the next until the pastor, Father Richard Albert, begins 7 a.m. Mass. In his homily, he tells us the parish is shaped into base ecclesial communities as proposed in the 10-year pastoral plan for the archdiocese of Kingston.

“To more radically live out our Christian life in Waterhouse, we chose to love,” he says. The communities “share what they have.” They pray together, study the Bible together, comfort the sick.

Next door is the parish school with an enrollment of 1,500. In their vulnerable beauty, the children are the gems of Jamaica. Wearing white blouses, school jumpers or tan pants, their scrubbed cleanliness is a miracle of love amid bleak poverty.

Over breakfast in his small rectory, Father Albert talks about his people and life in Waterhouse and Riverton City, the latter a community where families and older men and women displaced by the demolition of Kingston slums, live within the boundaries of a city dump.

The New York native, in Jamaica 14 years, transferred from the Franciscans of the Atonement six years ago to become a priest of the Kingston archdiocese. He has been pastor at St. Patrick’s for almost six years.

Waterhouse is a “very low” income area, he says, with inhabitants. Malnutrition is everywhere. Each Tuesday and Thursday, theparish operates a soup kitchen to feed the blind people.

Jamaica has the lowest Catholic population in the Caribbean, he says, about 10 percent of the two million population. Catholics are the target of evangelicals who preach always about “those people.” He has the proud reality of this as he speaks. A tent revival is being held nightly in a field next to the parish school.

“Our church is not your church,” he tells the American journalists. “here the people have to deal with the lack of food, police brutality, social injustice. John Paul is a hero here. What he speaks about we like to hear.” He is referring to papal encyclicals dealing with Third World injustices.

“I preach for 35, 40 minutes at the two Sunday Masses. They come for a teaching.” It is, he relates, a “beautiful church” with a social conscience in the Biblical sense.

“The poor have converted me, made me a better priest,” he says of himself. “In their simple faith, they bring Christ to me.”

“I’m the one who lives with them. They need a preacher, doctor, fireman, policeman, they have to come here. You become ‘the fadda.’”

Few services are available in Waterhouse. It isn’t the safest area, he remarks. The worst posses, as drug dealing gangs are known, come from the area. There is always tension with the police.

“Food for the Poor has sustained me from the beginning,” the priest says. Assistance includes food, sewing machines, and as we would shortly see in Riverton City, solid new structures to house the elderly.

Father Albert refers to the “theology of presence” that takes him beyond the walls of his Waterhouse church property. “It’s most important that I listen to them, that I’m there.”

One dramatic example of his presence is the account of the “exodus” from Riverton City just before Hurricane Gilbert struck last Sept. 12.

“The rains started Sunday evening. The winds were so high by Monday at 3 a.m. I knew I had to get the people out. The only way was to get dump trucks and carry them out,” he recalled.

He got four trucks and between 7 and 10:30 a.m. managed to get the entire population of several hundred out and sheltered in the concrete parish school at St. Patrick’s.

“We had just gotten the last group of cripples out when the zinc went, houses were flying here. I lost the (rectory) roof.” Gilbert, with its 160 mile winds pounding Jamaica, left 45 people dead, thousands injured. It destroyed 100,000 housing units, most of them low-income, and left 810,000 homeless.

Food for the Poor was one of the first relief agencies to respond to the island disaster. In all, a total of 52 trailers of emergency supplies, valued at $2.2 million, was delivered to victims in the two months following the hurricane.

The Riverton City landscape is flat, vegetation is sparse and gives off little shade. Smells of charcoal and rotting garbage hover in the air. Skeletons of rusted cars dot the lanes.

There is one water pipe in Riverton City, Father Albert has been able, through Food for the Poor, to build three concrete showers, to provide equipment and pay teachers for the pre-school class held in the “community building,” to supply the health center next door with medicines.

Currently FFP is making it possible for families to build one room wooden houses 12 by 10 feet, for elderly men and women. The houses cost $1,600 U.S. dollars. About 25 have already been erected in Riverton City and adjacent slum areas. Father Albert hopes to build at least 100 of these sturdy homes.

Women and children, some younger men come out when they catch sight of the stocky priest in the white cassock. He hugs children, listens as mothers tell him their needs, their problems. To requests of “Fadda, I want a house all to myself,” he replies firmly that they are for the old or disabled.

It is late morning. Loaded trucks are beginning to arrive at the dumping site a short bus ride away. Mud prevents the bus from parking close. We slide through mud as acrid smoke and the pungent stench of the new and rotting garbage choke us, burn our eyes.

“Dante should write about this,” Father Edward Dillon, a pastor from Aiken, S.C., says. In this grim scene a brown and white cow forages among the refuse. The young men who clamber aboard the trucks at the Riverton City entrance rummage in the reeking pile, masks covering their noses and mouths, snatching first crack at throw-away trash dumped along with soggy garbage.

After Riverton City, the cheerfulness at St. Monica’s Home for Lepers and Abandoned Elderly lifts our spirits. There are 30 adults and two children living here, Sister Jacqueline, a Sister of Mercy of the Cincinnati province, tells us.

One patient, George, stands with quiet composure before us in the long room where the patients take their meals. He will recite “The Disiderata,” Ferdy Mahfood announces.

“Go placidly amid the noise and haste of life and remember what peace there may be in silence,” George begins. A hush falls over the room as he speaks the lines written by Max Ehrmann in 1922. He has long committed them to memory. His delivery is clear and well modulated.

“You have a right to be here,” this gentle man with the leprosy-ravaged face tells us. “Keep peace in your soul…be cheerful...strive to be happy…” We realize how inadequate a “thank you” is for the luminous moment George gives as his gift to the day’s visitors.

From the tranquillity of travel to the bustling Laws Street Trade Training School Centre directed by Sister Mary Benedict, R.S.M., who is also principal of Holy Family School just outside the centre’s gate. There are 1,365 children enrolled in grades four through eleven at this facility begun by the Sisters of Mercy in 1894.

After a lunch well prepared and served by Laws Street trainees, we move to the centre’s large assembly hall crammed with Food for the Poor food containers, mattresses, chairs and desks awaiting distribution. We admire a shiny new cycle equipped with large refrigerated box. The cycle, Sister explains, was given to centre by FFP. “It will give a man a chance to earn money.” He will pay the centre a stipend for enabling him to peddle around Kingston selling baked goods from the Laws Street bakery.

“Food for the Poor,” explains the sister with the executive talents of a C.E.O., “is the first to say what can we do to enable you to provide the means so that people can be trained (for employment).” The agency is “a tremendous help in the school funding program.” While the government pays teachers’ salaries, desks, chairs and other supplies are “desperately needed.” Even teachers have to scramble for chairs, she says.

The Mercy sister has been at Laws Street 29 years and is well respected as a peacemaker in this “very volatile area.” She is a first generation Jamaican as is her sister, Jean Williams, a member of Corpus Christi parish in Stone Mountain. Their parents were born in Canton, China.

Laws Street Centre offers free training in baking, cooking, housewifery, child care and garment making. The bakery and cooking trainees cater lunches and dinners for business groups. Hand-embroidered skirts, aprons, towels and other items are for sale in the sewing training room.

“We operate on the mercy of God and people’s generosity,” says Sister Mary Benedict.

A short walk down Laws Street brings us to Faith Centre, the varied ministry to the poor operated by Father Richard Ho Lung, well-known to many in the Atlanta archdiocese, especially for the concerts presented by his singing group.

It was Father Ho Lung, Ferdy Mahfood says, who first took him to the deplorable poorhouse Eventide and stirred his own awareness of the needs of the poor. The priest was the “moving force behind the public outcry that forced the government to rebuild the facility.” He champions Jamaica prison reform and contributes a “Ghetto Priest” diary to the Kingston daily newspaper.

Fifty-two residents, mentally and physically handicapped, live at Faith Centre, Father Ho Lung says. A night shelter for old men, soup kitchen, mini-school, and a weaving shop are part of the complex.

Food for the Poor provides the means to feed, clothe and house his people, the priest says.

His religious community, Little Brothers of the Poor, is incardinated in the Kingston archdiocese. There are 14 candidates now attending the diocesan seminary. The priest has been asked by a bishop in India to open a home in his diocese.

Volunteers built the new log chapel on the grounds. Its large stained glass window was created by another American volunteer. Furnishings were provided by Food for the Poor. Father Ho Lung says there are about six or eight volunteers currently at Faith Centre. We see them at work as we tour the buildings.

Mary Queen of Peace Home for Abandoned Elderly run by Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity is the final of our pilgrimage. Sister Wilfreda, the superior, awaits us outside the substantial building made available for 49 years by the government without cost.

Six sisters care for the 69 “clients” in cots in the large rooms opening off a cool atrium planted with trees and flowers. A shrine to Mary dominates one end.

Someone asks Sister Wilfreda where the patients come from. “People tell us about people in the street. If they have no one, we take them in,’ she answers in her soft voice.

To help their mission of charity, Food for the Poor provides food, clothes, furniture, Sister Wilfreda says. Missionary of Charity for 13 years, Sister Wilfreda says most of the care have a “spiritual poverty” which the sisters try to enrich through prayer and gentle counseling. Many of the women wear rosaries around their necks or have them nearby. They are happy to see us and several say they will pray for us.

Two or three of us climb the stairs to the airy second floor and visit the chapel where a sign invites “Come and Rest Awhile.” There is a serenity here that blocks out the street clamor. A familiar blue-bordered white habit prays before the statue of Mary. A weary priest, sitting near the door, remarks, “They have saved the best for last.”

Anyone interested can contract Food for the Poor Inc., at Department 1372, 1301 W. Copans Road, Pompano Beach, Fla., 33064.