In the slum community of Majesty Gardens, also known as “Back To” in the South St Andrew badlands, a six-year-old girl relieves herself from the edge of a gully which runs near to her home.

There is no outward show of embarrassment, as the photographer aims his camera. Not even when the adults pass by. She merely looks away, but continues the natural act.

In the gully beneath her are disgusting piles of human waste, pools of stagnant water filled with mosquito larvae and every imaginable piece of garbage.

“Back To” is one of several impoverished communities which fall within the boundaries of the South St Andrew police division, and officers who patrol the streets and lanes of the area say squalid conditions like these invariably rob human beings of their dignity. They believe that such conditions must be hastily improved if the crime rate is to fall.

“The deplorable social conditions of the people in these areas need to be improved or the situation will not get better,” Detective Inspector Lennox Harper of the Hunts Bay police tells the Sunday Observer.

There is a haunting sadness in the eyes of this hardened policeman. He is tough but he has a heart.

“We who go to these communities daily know that most of them are unemployed and if they have nothing to do, then they will turn to crime,” Harper says.

He and his colleague crime-fighters have had the dubious distinction of working in the police division that has seen the most blood and wanton killings this year. More than 160 persons have been murdered in the division.

Police say they have recovered 58 guns and a number of rounds of assorted ammunition over the same period in the division. But that is just scraping the surface.

There are six police stations in the division: Hunts Bay, which is the divisional headquarters; and the Seaview Gardens, Duhaney Park, Newport West, Olympic Gardens and Ferry police stations. The division contains some of the toughest inner-city communities in Kingston and life is cheap on its mean streets.

Some of these communities are Seaview Gardens, Tavares Gardens or “Payne Land”, Tower Hill, Olympic Gardens, Waterhouse, “Mongoose Town”, McDonald Lane, Myrie Avenue, McCoy Lane, Majesty Gardens or “Back To”, “Gully Bank”, “Little Cuba”, Waltham Lands, Whitfield Town, St Joseph’s Road, Seivwright Gardens, Drewsland, Union Gardens, Two Miles, Maverley, Chisolm Avenue, Duhaney Park and Ferry Lane.

These densely populated communities are home to thousands of the nation’s poorest. Joblessness, lack of basic sanitary facilities like running water, are a fact of life for most residents, many of whom are eking out a hard living on a minimum wage, if they work at all.

In an area known as “Gully Bank” in Waterhouse, hundreds of residents live in crude shanties on the banks of the Sandy Gully. They have plenty of one thing: children.

Across the gully is the squatter settlement of “Little Cuba”, a tight network of shacks located on a spit of land behind the Jamaica Public Service Electronic Communications property at Washington Boulevard.

“Little Cuba” is bordered by the main course of the Sandy Gully and a large tributary which runs underneath the Washington Boulevard. In times of heavy rain, the people who have made the place home are marooned. There is no other way out but through the gully. It is a reality the people there have come to live with.

“We nuh have nowhere else to live so now we just say when rain fall we just have fi batten down,” one man explains, flashing a toothless grin.

The combined stench of human excrement, garbage and stagnant water frightfully offends the nostrils. Children, some as young as two years old, frolic on the gully’s edge, oblivious, it seems, to the squalor and degradation and hopelessness. All the children had multiple sores on their bodies, caused by mosquito bites, according to the residents of Gully Bank.

“Dem bite up de pickney dem and afterwards nuff a dem have sore pan dem skin,” one man offers.

In the lower section of St Joseph’s Road, some persons were taking nude baths at a standpipe in full view of the public when the Sunday Observer visited the area. Women, teenage girls and small children were among them. That was the only pipe in the area.

Myrie Avenue is a small lane which runs off Spanish Town Road. Ramshackle board houses in sprawling tenements dot the landscape. There are no toilets and many residents dispose of their waste in overflowing pits in the area.

At a yard at 12 Myrie Avenue, Icilda Henry, an elderly woman whose emaciated 82 year-old body was clad in old rags, lies helplessly on the floor of a one-room board dwelling. The residents say she has no relatives and they give her what care they can.

“Ahh, mi son,” was all she could say to this reporter.

Young children played barefooted in the street in the bright early afternoon sun and a group of young men sat on a corner smoking marijuana and drinking beer.

“We nuh have nutten better to do than bun weed pan the corner because we nuh have nuh work and it look like de system don’t remember we,” one of the teenagers remarks.

A planned Jamaica Social Investment Fund (JSIF) project for the area can’t come too soon.

JSIF announced it will funnel some $39.7 million into a sanitation upgrading project in Whitfield Town. The project is funded by an allocation under the European Union’s Poverty Reduction Programme.

More than 1,500 residents of the inner-city community will benefit from the installation of over 100 domestic sanitation units consisting of flush toilets and showers.

JSIF said it will also install an external water supply and sewage system, as well as rehabilitate 70 existing sanitation units.

A prefabrication plant has been set up and will manufacture material used in the construction of the units and maintain the system when the work is completed.

The plant is run by members of the community and the project is being undertaken in association with the Whitfield Town Community Development Committee. The project is forecast to be completed by the end of 2004.

According to Gangolf Schmidt of JSIF, the residents of the area will be given training courses in the proper care of the units. “We are going to start a training programme on hygiene and maintenance of the facilities,” Schmidt says.

The toilets will be installed at a rate of one per yard. In densely populated areas like St Joseph’s Road, where the first set of units are being installed, a ‘yard’ can be home to at least 100 persons.

“We glad for the new toilet and shower but more help still wanted ’cause so much people can’t use one toilet,” said one man in the St Joseph’s Road area. But it’s a start, he concedes.