- Contributed
Some members of the Kiwanis Club of North St. Andrew relaxing after organising a recent health fair at the church premises.
Teino Evans, Staff Reporter
MANY PARTS of downtown Kingston have long been branded as a main breeding ground for much of the country's crime and violence, but the North Street United Church, which has been a tower of strength in western Kingston for 167 years has been working to effect a positive change.
Seven years ago, the church embarked on a mission to reach out to residents of the North Street community when they founded the Roy Edwards Human Development Centre.
The Centre currently has a number of outreach projects going, among them a day care facility, bakery and skills-training centre.
The entire outreach is operated at a cost close to $6 million dollars annually, but the church is able to access funding through a number of sponsorships and donations, from various organisations including Food for the Poor and the Kiwanis Club of New Kingston.
The building was renovated 1996 and made fully operational in February 1997.
According to the Reverend Dave Spence, Minister at the North Street United Church, for a number of years, the church had a skills-training programme in garment-making. That came out of consultative meetings between the church and community which went back as far as the early 1980s when residents said one way in which the church could help was to set up a skills-training programme.
CHAIN REACTION
The programme was set up and women from the church would teach young women from the community how to sew.
Subsequently, there has been a chain reaction of developments with the day care facility being set up, primarily to accommodate women who would need to leave their babies somewhere as they went to get training or in search of jobs. The bakery was set up to earn income to run the centre, as well as to provide training in baking technology for people who might be interested. These three areas were opened in 1997.
Another aspect of the outreach of the church at that time was the medical clinic, which was held for elderly persons in the church vestry on a Saturday morning once per month. Those programmes are now housed in the new centre, Rev. Spence said.
He said that, since then, based on their observations of children coming to the day care centre, it was discovered that many of them were in need of medical attention.
"In one particular instance we had to write to the parents to tell them that we would not accept the child back at the day care until the child got medical attention. The child had measles and the parent was telling me that they were trying all sorts of home remedies," Rev. Spence said.
It was at that point, that it occurred to them that if the church was to offer efficient and effective services to the community, then one way would be to have a paediatric clinic, to counter this problem.
Subsequently, a section of the day care was parted off and a clinic was set up. "Currently, the Jamaica Medical Doctors Association, formerly Junior Doctors Association, volunteers a doctor each week to see the children on Wednesdays," Rev. Spence said.
In the late 1990s, the garment construction phase of the outreach project went through a hiccup, when most of the jobs in garment manufacturing went with the factories to South America, and as a result, many persons were unable to get jobs. "The women started saying 'what's the point in being trained if we not going to get jobs?'," Rev. Spence recalls.
HEART Trust/NTA, which was funding the programme at that time, said if the church could not find 25 students, then they could no longer get funding. Though unsuccessful in attracting this number, the church tried to maintain the programme on its own, but after about a year, they eventually gave in.
"Every year we have consultative open-air meetings with community members to discuss how the church has been impacting and what are some of the things the church can do to help the community," Rev. Spence said.
It was at one of these meetings in 2001, community residents suggested that a computer lab be set up.
According to Spence, "Many residents were complaining that almost everywhere they went to get jobs, people were asking them if they had computer skills, and most of them didn't."
By the following meeting in 2002, a new computer lab of 10 workstations was set up and they began to offer training in basic computer skills.
FUTURE PLANS
Rev. Spence says they are now hoping to take the day care centre to another level, which will include parental training and psychometrics testing for children.
"We hope to get them in clean environments, which is stimulating intellectually," he said. "In many instances we are taking them (children) out of very depressing situations and circumstances; parents who sell in the market and have the children sitting on the garbage heap or sitting under the stall. When we take them out of that situation and have them in a clean environment that is stimulating intellectually, by the time they get into school, they are doing much better than their counterparts who did not have day care backgrounds," Rev. Spence said.
"The challenge we face now is that we have the day care and a primary school, but the link in between is a basic school that we don't now have. We, however, hope to establish the basic school at some future date, where we would be able to run the children right through, from three months up to age 12," Rev. Spence says.
The future hope for the primary school (North Street Primary), now operated by the church, is to build a bigger school to accommodate the 274 students now on role. The school, Rev. Spence says, was built 167 years ago to accommodate only 90 students.
The original clinic now has a counselling clinic associated as well, where adolescents can get counselling on sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).
According to Rev. Spence, a few years ago several young girls turned up at school with STDs. The Nurse Luis Picker Counselling Clinic was later established, named after Nurse Picker who was a member of the church (North Street United) and a community nurse.
The clinic is funded through the Ministry of Health, under the Adolescent Reproductive Health Project, which is administered and monitored by 'Youth Now' and funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
Though the project focuses on HIV/STD education and prevention, Rev. Spence says they have gone on further to look at some of the issues relating to ethics, morals and values. Currently they are looking to expand the programme, as they only have one counsellor who has been swamped.
"The counselling ratio is something like 1:125. We are looking to employ two additional counsellors this year," as they seek to get in line with the United Church's thrust towards having counselling care centres in a number of churches.
Sponsoring successful 'life' ventures
THE NORTH Street United Church's outreach programme has had a number of success stories in the seven years since the Roy Edwards Human Development Centre was established.
Minister at the sponsoring church, Reverend Dave Spence, tells how one young woman was able to make something of her life by working in the bakery.
This young woman, a fifth form graduate of the St. Hugh's High School in Kingston, was hoping to go on to sixth form. However, during the summer of her fifth form year after she graduated, she became pregnant. By the time her results came out, (having passed four subjects), she could not return to school.
After the baby was born, she went in search of a job but with no success, as not many persons were willing to hire someone with a Luke Lane address.
She eventually got a job with "a fairly reputable" company, but this time putting a Portmore address on her application. She started working, and everything went fine until one day there was a major riot in downtown Kingston and she was unable to go to work. It was then that her employers found out that she did not live in Portmore, at which point she was fired for 'lying' on her application form.
This was about the time when the bakery opened at the church and so she approached them in search of a job. She was employed as a cashier in the bakery, but according to Rev. Spence, "she was far more skilled than just being a cashier in the bakery."
Eventually she moved up to the point where she was managing the bakery within a few years, and she is currently a board member of the outreach centre.
"We have a community representative on the board, and she is that person," Rev. Spence says. "I kept challenging her, saying she was far more talented than what she was doing and that she needed to get on with her life," Rev. Spence told her.
Now, she has two children and is in her final year in teacher's college and hopes to do a degree in education.
"The church helped me 100 per cent and when I complete my studies , I want too teach at the primary school to give back to the community," she told the Sunday Gleaner.
There was another young woman from the community who attended youth fellowship at the church. She went to Convent of Mercy (Alpha High School) in Kingston and did very well, but got to the point where she could not go any further because her parents just could not afford any further education for her.
This young woman who wanted to do law, was told by her father to join the Police Force and work because it was now time for her to support him. She had four A' Levels, and so the church decided to help her to go to university. She is now in her final year at university, doing well in her studies of psychology and sociology, with the hope of going to law school afterwards.
This young lady now heads one of the church's outreach ministries, which is a literacy programme that is held on a Sunday afternoon in the centre for mostly young men in the area.
