Avia Collinder, Gleaner Writer

Louise Sinclair with her foster daughter Yahneake and Tyler, her grandson at their Kingston 13 home. - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer

Those who have nowhere to rest when night falls would understand and appreciate the reason almost every room in the house of Louise Sinclair, a well-kept, if small two bedroom dwelling in Kingston 11, has been converted to sleeping space.

This house, a place of rest for the destitute, has been used to house as many as nine children.

The children are stray souls abandoned by their parents and taken in by Louise who, employed sporadically as a seamstress, seems to possess an uncanny ability to stretch the small earnings of her husband - a barber - to feed the many, if not the 5,000.

Louise, who The Gleaner met early this month when the Outlook Magazine sought the winner of its bedroom makeover competition, lost out by just a whisker's breadth.

Beaten to the punch by a couple who fostered ten children, a decade earlier she would have been found at home in a similar "occupied" state.

According to Latesha, her daughter who now attends nursing school, there was a time when five brothers and sisters shared the humble home with her and her three brothers and sisters who are Louise's own children.

I could smell them from a mile away

Recalling the day the children appeared at her gate, her mother has stated, "I could smell them from a mile away."

The oldest was 12. The smallest child, a girl, was two and a half years old. The children were living on Rocky Road in the open on one big bed spring covered by three sheets.

The bed spring was separated from the ground by four bricks. Now 57 years old, Louise is well known for her benevolence, caring for the old and young, as well as those affected by HIV/AIDS.

Yvonne, she states, was a young woman abandoned by church and family when they discovered that she was HIV positive.

"I took her clothes home to wash them and brought her breakfast and dinner until she died."

Louise also cared for one retiree who had no children and who could no longer care for herself. "I fed her, combed her hair and tried to get her church people to help her. The church should be your family," Louise recalls. The children's father was in prison and their mother had disappeared one day. They came to Louise for food but, instead, found a home.

While the church slowly pondered the situation, Louise did all she could.

Welcome meals

Several young men - some of whom, sadly, have gone to prison - still remember Mrs. Sinclair's caring words and welcome meals.

There are men in prison, she states, who "correspond with me. They say, 'if it wasn't for you I would be dead'."

Louise admits that, among the boys she has sought to help, some will rebel.

"Even your own kids will rebel. But, you have to try."

She has even given away her husband's dinner on several occasions. He, however, supports her in everything she does.

"I ask the Lord why, but they just happen to come into my life," Louise says.

Now that her own children are grown, she fosters two other children, including nine-year-old Yahneake, who was taken in as a three-month-old baby.

Louise and her family have lived in a rented home for the past 27 years at 1D Berwick Road in Kingston 11. This place remains her command centre from which she plans operations of deliverance, caring for the old and sick, the sad and abandoned.

"I grow up seeing my mother do this thing," she says.

For Louise Sinclair it's a way of life that she refuses to change. Her home remains a place of rest.