PATRICK Richards and his six children spent the wee hours of Christmas morning last year trying to dodge raindrops seeping through the cracks of their makeshift house just outside of Moneague in St Ann.

But thanks to the generosity of local charity group Food For the Poor (FFP) and his neighbours, Richards and his children will be able to enjoy today in a brand new two-bedroom structure that the entity handed over to them about two weeks ago.

The difference between what was home last year and the new structure they now call home — complete with living room, bathroom, kitchen and verandah — has not been lost on Richards.

“The living condition was extremely bad. There was no running water, so we had a few jugs that we used to catch the rainfall to do washing, cooking, and other things,” he told the Sunday Observer. “The house leaked, because it was like some stick that we cut and a few pieces of board and we had like some canvas around it, and we just made it a home. We really worked with it and give thanks, still.”

He explained that the wooden structure was partitioned into three rooms to ensure that his four girls were separated from him and his two sons.

The 44-year-old father was left to take care of his children, ages six to 18, when he and their mother separated in 2007. He said things between them began to sour shortly after he was laid off from his job as a supervisor at North Eastern Parks and Market in 2001. He turned to farming, but this was not very profitable.

“With all of that, I kept struggling. I never have a job, I had to go like at the landfills and pick up drinks bottles and stuff like that and put it together and sell and, like, have a small salary. Trust me, the money was like $300 or so. The biggest money I make was like $1,500,” he said.

Richards said he would go to the landfills at 8:00 am, shortly after sending his children off to school, and return home after 1:00 pm so he could collect his youngest child from school. The rest of the day would be spent preparing meals, assisting with schoolwork and getting them ready for school the next day.

His commitment to his children did not go unnoticed, and a few of their teachers would, at times, send them home with food. A small cadre of women from the church and the community would offer advice and assistance where possible.

“Earlier on this year, the Child Development Agency people heard about the situation, in that the housing never proper and the surrounding never really conducive to living, and so forth. So they took away two of the kids, a girl and a boy,” he said. “There were a few church people, along with the teacher, who saw the move and say, well, they really have to come on board in a more positive way and seek some help for me and the kids them.”

Food For the Poor was contacted to see how it could assist. In addition to the house, the agency also gave the family groceries, clothes and furniture, thus ensuring that Richards and his children will have a merrier Christmas this year.

Richards, who is estranged from his family, said he was overwhelmed by the generosity of FFP and especially the women in his community. He is a trained mason, so he is now hoping that he can get a steady job close to home to better provide for his children in the new year. But for today, he is just planning on relaxing and tackling some chores with his offspring.

“Mi and the children dem going to clean. I am kind of one of the little tidy man them still who will get up and take up broom and ting, you know,” he said.

Richards is one of 1,216 persons who have been given houses by FFP since the start of the year in the organisation’s attempt to ensure that at least some needy families would not have to spend another Christmas in the dilapidated shelters they last year called home.

But the entity is still not satisfied, as it had hoped to hand over at least 3,000 homes this year.

“Back in the days, up to a year-and-a-half ago, you could knock that off in a year or a little over a year, because we were building 300 per month. So you are doing 100 per month now and you end up with 1,200 for the year. If we were still doing our 300, we would have done 3,600 for the year,” said marketing and public relations consultant for FFP Audley McCarthy.

As it turns out, the group’s desire to assist more persons has been curtailed because of limited financial resources, and contributions from members of the public have slowed to a trickle. Efforts to get people to donate locally have not been very successful. McCarthy pointed to the fact that despite placing 70 marked boxes at various locations across the island, the amount contributed to these boxes in the past three years combined is less than the $250,000 it would cost to build just one of FFP’s single housing units.

“They (boxes) are all over the island, we have them in pharmacies, supermarkets, we have them in insurance companies, banks, we have it at the Norman Manley International Airport and we have just concretised a corporate partnership with Courts Jamaica and Singer, so we have eight boxes in each of those furniture stores as well,” he said.

With not enough corporate sponsorship, the majority of the funds necessary to build the houses is sourced from North America through the FFP head office in Florida.

“Essentially we need houses and we would say okay, here is John Brown down here, this is his condition, this is his ‘before’ picture. Food For the Poor up there basically appeals to their donors to help them to be able to build houses. So a family might decide to donate in the honour of a dead relative, or a group of persons might come together and put on a charity event and the proceeds are given to Food For the Poor,” McCarthy said.

“What Food For the Poor further does is they now would send that money down in order for us to be able to build a house for John Brown, so the money comes from them and their donors,” he said.

But he believes corporate entities and citizens here can assist in helping to meet the demand for housing by contributing to this endeavour. Just two weeks ago, staff from public relations agency PROCommunications was able to enrich the lives of an elderly woman and her granddaughter by allocating the budget for its traditional Christmas party to build them a house instead.

The woman, Sybil Morrison, and her granddaughter Britanya, were in dire need after the roof of their former home fell in. The PROCommunications staff, led by founder and managing director Jean Lowrie-Chin, not only handed over the $278,400 to the FFP Housing and Infrastructure manager, but also assisted with the technical details and painting of the house.

Morrison was forced to raise her granddaughter in a dilapidated structure on Mount Salus in rural St Andrew after gunmen invaded her home in Franklyn Town in 2005, killing her daughter and the child’s mother. Britanya was five years old at the time.

McCarthy hopes that kindnesses such as this will become a regular occurrence in corporate Jamaica and put a dent in the growing demand for housing for families falling below the poverty line, demand he suspects will continue to grow.

“Technically speaking, I can tell you that we are three years behind, if at the moment we can only build 1,200 (houses),” McCarthy said. “We have on our waiting list 4,000 persons plus, who are waiting on us to give them a house. They are approved and everything and are in the system [but] the funds are just not available to go out there and build.”

Apart from proving a need, a person would have to own the land they would like to build on, or have a written lease before they are approved by the organisation.

“People think this is too demanding, but we have seen cases where a couple are together and one of their parent say look here, you can build the house on this land with no written agreement or nothing, and then the couple breaks up. You really perhaps wanted to give it to the woman because she has six children, but when the couple breaks up and it is the boyfriend’s parents’ land, she has to take up herself and leave and you can’t lift up the house,” explained McCarthy.

Food For the Poor works with about seven contractors who have sacrificed over the years to ensure that the houses are put up in a relatively short time. A house can be built within four hours after a foundation has been laid. Unfortunately, McCarthy said, they have had challenges over the years in getting community members to help with the laying of the foundation.

He recalled one situation earlier this year when the organisation was challenged to get residents of a Clarendon community to help them lay the foundation for a four-bedroom house that the Bank of Nova Scotia (BNS) had sponsored for a mother and her 11 children.

“Nobody would help to build the foundation and when we finally put up the house — because our staff members went down now with staff from BNS to build the house — can I tell you that the level of animosity, the sense of jealousy was shocking. One woman I personally heard, she looked and said, ‘but she a get house and for 20 years now me want a house and me can’t get it,’” recounted McCarthy.

Despite the challenges, Food For the Poor continues to do what it can to help the poor and indigent. Since the start of the Yuletide season, it has feted at least 200 residents and 17 staff members at the Golden Age Home. It also hosted a treat for 17 residents at Christian Care Nursing Home which it operates in Downtown Kingston.

The organisation also recently paid the fines to secure the release of 21 inmates from various penal institutions so they could spend Christmas with their families, and on December 15, a little under 1,000 indigent persons were treated to a fun day at Emmet Park, St George’s College.