Ronald Thwaites | Betty’s curse

“You can give me one a dem farm work card fi my boyfriend? If I get it, I will neva come beg you again ...” Betty is around 25. Her beautiful eyes pleaded recently.

She had come to see me accompanied by her three youngest children and, predictably, concluded by telling me that they “neva drink no tea” and wanted a food money. One look at them confirmed the need.

This isn’t a sob story. It is a narrative of the reality which the majority of Jamaicans face this week. Call it a ‘bleeding heart’ tale, if you wish. Yes. Exactly. It would help if more of us had hearts of flesh rather than hearts of stone in this time of national and personal crisis.

Telling of her life, by no means exceptional, is to humanise the stimulus efforts, the digitised applications and to chronicle to whom and how much of the money voted gets to the really needy.

Betty had come to my attention probably 12 years ago on East Queen Street where one of the southward lanes intersects. The strikingly good-looking child, just becoming a woman, had come to her mother, a distraught, woebegone peddler of anything – rizzla, weed and sometimes fry-egg sandwiches at night – for some toilet paper to use the bathroom.

When I happened on the scene, the girl was getting a public, street-side, b-c cussing from her own mother for having used up more than the six squares of the tissue roll which was meant to last and share. No, that tracing cannot be repeated here.

Turned out that it was the girl’s monthly time. Her humiliation was as acute as her mother’s anger was angrily self-descriptive and the corner youths’ wagging tongues, cruel.

One of the big women walking with me took Betty aside, some sanitary supplies provided and a friendship developed. Not that it helped her much over the years.

The negative social forces on the lane, the fitful attendance at the boring school and the never-had-before affirmation of menfolk, who kept telling her she looked nice and would sometimes buy her a two-piece KFC combo, all conspired that before long the report came: “Betty gone up”.

She has five children now, her physical appearance under pressure of neglect and abuse; has never had a serious job and bounced from babyfather to boyfriend and back. Anywhere she can get help.

The current gentleman has now sent her to the politician to beg a chance to “travel”. “Him will soon sen’ for me ...” Her smile returns with the prospect. But it is short-lived.

“Mi feel like mi is jus’ a curse,” she wails.

ISSUE OF SURVIVAL

Right now the issue is how to survive. Betty wants to know if she can get the Government’s compassionate grant even though two of the children are on PATH. I really don’t know but encouraged her to try. Who said recently in similar desperation, “What have you got to lose”?

It’s the children we must be most concerned about. There is no hope if the social and economic distress of Betty’s life becomes intergenerational. She and her kind are already victims of those forces.

The 40 or so most vulnerable-for-virus communities identified by Parris Lyew-Ayee Jr and Howard Mitchell must be provided with the basics of life now. Can we rise beyond the politically branded packages available to the chosen few?

Follow the suggestion of the Risk Assessment Study and engage the churches, the justices of the peace and willing teachers to dispense food and to recommend people for restoration of livelihood grants. And it should not take 30 days from application to disbursement either.

In these times, anyone who needs a meal should be able to get it – free and without cross-examination. Consider the criminal irony happening before our eyes. Farmers have tons of produce they cannot sell while tens of thousands of citizens have run out of money to afford food. Can anything be more perverse?

Talk the truth now, Jamaica: perhaps for the first time at last, are we up to showing ourselves that we value the life of all the sisters and brothers more than their economic or political utility?

I am trembling at the enormity of both the opportunity and challenge of the moment. With the fiscal space painstakingly wrought, the available help from international sources and if there were to be united national leadership, Jamaica can rise after this pestilence, not as a chronic low-wage economy, incubating more like Betty and her kind, but as a people of promise, dedicated not to bling, greed, gambling and debauchery but to self-respect and trust; purposeful hard work and the satisfaction which comes from generosity of spirit and effort.

The inspired discourse now should be how to get us spiritually and financially enabled so that – cured of crabbit irresponsibility and the disappointment about the prosperity talk, a doubling of the per capita income and healthy family and social life – could happen, all within our time.

Returning to the way things were is the ‘recession’ of which we should have the most fear.

This, after all, is the promise of Easter, new life rising from the suffering and death of the dreaded virus. And then, then, Betty would no longer think of her life as a curse – but a blessing!

Ronald Thwaites is member of parliament for Kingston Central. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.