AT 60, jobless and homeless, begging does not come easy to Lester Henderson, who paints a picture of his life these days as one of constant rejection.

But having been deported from the United States during the summer, it has become his means of survival, his only option, other than the meal he gets from the St Peter and Paul Roman Catholic Church in Liguanea.

“When you eat something from the church at 12 o’clock, and it’s not even a lot, my belly start rolling. So I go to a lady and ask if she can you give me $30 and I buy a bun,” Henderson told the Sunday Observer from the bus stop across from the Sovereign Centre in Liguanea.

“That’s not comfortable. Some people say you grown and you should work. So I try not to ask for grants.”

Asking, he said, always comes at a cost to his self-respect.

“It make me feel like a under something, like I don’t worth s..t. I shouldn’t have to do that,” said Henderson, adding that he was eager to find work and could be reached through the church where he takes lunch each day.

But at 60 years old, and without any identification or birth certificate, finding a job has proven difficult. His status as a deportee has not helped.

He was deported from Pompano Beach in Fort Lauderdale, he said, after spending four years on the streets there. He was left in the US alone and without a home after his sister migrated to the United Kingdom with her husband, he added.

After three successful attempts at evading the immigration authorities, he was, however, finally nabbed while painting a house in Pompano Beach.

In the more than three months since he has been back in Jamaica, he said the struggles of the homeless in Florida pale in comparison to the island.

“When I was in foreign, I wasn’t working. I don’t collect no money but there is a line and you can line up and get lunch, breakfast, dinner, clothes, shoes and medical care,” said Henderson who is originally from Cascade in Portland.

“Out here is different, totally different. If I had US$10 over there, you could get you dinner and still have some more to eat.”

He recently sought to get some help from the poor relief department downtown but had little success.

He was told that he had to consult a doctor for “him to say I sick with my back or something”. That doctor’s certificate, he said he was told by a female poor relief officer, would secure him benefits of $800.

“So I say to her, ‘If I don’t get sick, I can’t get nothing?’ She said the only thing I can get is $800 but I have to go to the doctor to certify me that I can’t work or nothing. But I don’t go down there, so I don’t get nothing.”

Reflecting on his own experience with the welfare officer, he added that it was little wonder some people became mentally ill.

“It just like she, well boy… I don’t know… I think this is one of the reasons people just go crazy,” he said.

Henderson said too that people in Jamaica could be harsh in their treatment of those who beg.

“The times we live in,” he said on a sigh. “No matter how you a dead fi hungry, you can’t go to some people door and ask for nothing,” he added, sounding a little angry.

Things are particularly difficult for him when it rains and the recent rains in the capital have left him depressed.

“A couple of days gone by, especially when it is raining, I feel like I would just give up. I feel like I would just give up life and I just say, ‘cho, f… it’. Excuse my language,” he said.

Henderson says he prays everyday for a job that will help to get him off Kingston’s streets and into a warm home with a warm bed, food on his table, and clothes on his back.