The other day while I was at mass, a young boy named Antoine came up behind me while I was sitting down and gave me a big hug.  He smiled at me, and then began brushing my hair.  I was deeply moved and turned to the older woman sitting beside him and asked,

            “Is this your son?”

            She laughed and said, no.  He is a “mad boy”.  She later proceeded to tell me that the boy is an orphan and that he appears on the road at five o clock in the morning. He stays outside without going to school and no one seems to know what he eats or how he gets by.   God only knows what happens to this seven year old as he walks the streets without a mother and a father to look after him, send him to school, and feed him. 

            This story is simply the tip of the iceberg in terms of poverty here in West Kingston where, as a Jesuit novice I have spent the past few months. But it didn’t take long before my beliefs and ideals around poverty were shattered.  I came in with notions of how poverty “builds community” and how “people still came together despite having so little.”  But there is poverty… and then there is poverty.  There is the poverty that one may see in movies, and then there is the poverty which grows from corruption; the poverty which is both caused by and leads to violence.   

            Three days a week I help with the classes at St Annie’s primary school located about five minutes from the house where we are staying.  The kids are amazing; and are glad to have a couple of foreigners around.  They light up when we are with them, and especially when we give them a little bit of our time.  They are jovial amazing children.  

           But you would never know what they deal with when they go home.  When we arrived,  the principal told us that that many of these kids,  only ten years old, were old enough to be scarred by what happened four years ago when a local gangster was extradited to the States on drug trafficking charges.  Some of the community did not want to see this gangster (who was supporting the community in some ways) fall into the hands of foreigners and so there was a big gun fight.   It is reported that seventy-four people died, but locals say the toll was much higher.  The other day a woman let me know that her own sister had been killed in the clashes when they were both at home.  A stray gun shot came in through the door and hit her sister in the neck. 

            Another young boy relayed to me how once when he was with his mom, he saw, felt, and heard a bullet fly past her head.   Experiencing gun shots, having members of one family killed, seems to be the norm rather than the exception.   Every week I hear gunshots.  Every three weeks I wake up to a gun battle.  Once a month I hear a woman in the distance wailing over someone close to her.  How does this mark a six year old?  How does it mark a community?

            The scars go deep here in West Kingston.  I was at a prayer service the other day, and the Catholic preacher spoke about an intergenerational curse; that they have been cursed, and the curse all come out in the form of rape, murder, theft, lies, and violence. 

            The other day a boy came to school with a knife intending to stab another student whom he is having a quarrel with.  I wondered what could ever possess a ten year old to believe that stabbing another person is a legitimate response to conflict.  But like the woman said, it didn’t begin with this ten year old.  He is buying into values that were put into place long before he was born.

              It seems that poverty and violence go hand in hand here.  That poverty despite the idealistic reputation it can have for breeding community, love, respect is actually doing the opposite.  Joblessness leads to idol hands.  Not having enough to eat leads some to steal from their neighbour.    Why work legitimately and scrape by for your family, when by picking up a gun you can make so much more? In fact, why walk around with a resume, when there are simply no jobs and you need money now.  Morality and law seems to lose power when dealing with empty stomachs. 

            There is a quote on the front door to the grade six class which reads, “Every child deserves a champion — an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be.”  The quote is from Rita Pierson a renowned educator. 

The boy I mentioned who brought a knife to school is an amazing kid.  He wants to be a farmer when he grows up.  And he could, he has enough brains to do it.  If he did become a farmer, what would that mean for his family? What would that mean for his community? What would that mean for him?