SAVANNA-LA-MAR, Westmoreland — Faced in recent years with a high level of bloodletting caused by warring factions in Grange Hill, Holy Trinity Anglican Church on Sunday attempted to bring peace and hope to the community through theatre. It staged a play to create awareness and effect change among residents.

The drama, Faith Under Fire, was performed by Green Island High School in Hanover. The venue was Sean Lavery Faith Hall in Savanna-la-Mar.

Chief programme organiser Veronica White told Jamaica Observer that fear influenced the decision to host the play outside the community for which its message was intended.

“Even though we have a proper church hall in Grange Hill at the Holy Trinity Church, we had to take it outside of the community because persons are afraid to come out. Anything that borders into the evening, nightfall, persons are not into it,” explained White.

She also spoke about the impact crime is having on the church and the wider community.

“We have members who are from communities who sometimes are afraid to come out. I have had an incident where I was about to take a member into a particular community that I won’t name. As sick as she was, she said: ‘Don’t come [inside the community]; they don’t know your vehicle and I don’t want any incident to happen.’ Sometimes… if you go into these communities and you are not cleared, then you can be in trouble,” relayed White.

She pointed to some people’s tendency to be unforgiving, something the play addresses.“This is the whole message of this production, to say that we have to learn to forgive, we have to be the bigger person in order to move on,” she told
Observer.

She is hoping the initiative will change lives.

“We cannot underestimate the power of peer influence, and when we have these influential leaders, sometimes we have to reach out to them — not in a condescending way — but to help them to understand that there is another way and option,” explained White.

“Most of these persons have themselves been marginalised and so the only thing that they know and respond to is negative influence. As a result of that, it is just perpetuity itself. As a church, as a community, as people, we have to first extend the olive branch, extend the arm of friendship, love, to let them understand that we care — and it’s in caring and sharing that the love comes out,” she added.

Playwright and teacher at Green Island High School, Shauna Miller said the play was originally done as a gospel drama for Jamaica Cultural Development Commission’s (JCDC) Jamaica Festival of the Performing Arts . It was awarded the Most Outstanding Gospel Drama, along with nine other national awards.

Fate Under Fire tells the story of a young man (gang leader Dog Teeth) who grew up without any parents and chose a life of crime and violence. He initially plagued the community but eventually, he was touched by the hand of God.

“The church actually saw it being performed and asked us to bring it to this performance. What we had to do is that we had to move it out of the 30-minute slot into an hour and 15 minutes,” stated Miller.

The play was performed at Little Theatre in Kingston, and Miller said the response “was really tear-jerking”. She also spoke about the reaction in Savanna-la-Mar on Sunday.

“I think what it will do is open the eyes of other agencies to understand that you can’t leave this alone — all of us have to play our part, in particular the Church. It is not just the responsibility of the police or the Government. Every one of us as citizens has a responsibility to help them because a lot of the time all these young people are crying for is just a little help, it is just a little love,” she said.

Miller said the play in some instances mirrored the life story of student actors.

“In the school system, once they become a little challenging then they are labelled as being defiant and all sorts of things. This for me is a project, it is an experiment, because most of them are not students that are the glowing ones,” stated Miller.

“This was really done for them to do a sort of introspection of who they are and where they are going because some of them are from very volatile communities. Some of them are open to a lot of these issues and so for me, this is an opportunity to grab them before it is too late,” she added.

Custos of Westmoreland, Canon Hartley Perrin is of the view that there are a number of gangs in Grange Hill that are influential in the lives of young people. He said this is widescale across the parish where young people are more inclined to join gangs than to be found in the Church.

“What this is showing is that the Church has a role to play. They are using drama as a means of carrying out the message but it also shows that there is the urgent need for the Church to go into the communities where the boys are,” he argued.

“What we are also seeing in the play is a fear factor. What the dons have been able to do in terms of driving fear — not only in families but also in the communities — they plunder, they rape and they destroy. That is what we are fighting against because our young people have to see that there is a better way,” argued the custos.

“The parish also is affected by the lottery scamming; and of course, dons are created by the lottery scamming because when the people ‘bingo’, as they call it — which means that they have gotten large sums of money from one client or a number of clients — they now have money at their disposal to buy firearms as well as to bribe the citizens and the young people, especially in the community. They seem to wield more authority and more power because they have money and they are able to buy fancy cars and buy a lot of drinks. As a result of that, they have that kind of influence over young people,” he added.

He said the play was timely.

“The time is right, now, for this great intervention that seeks to bring salvation and holiness to young people because many of them are really troubled and they come from troubled homes, troubled communities. Some of them live in squalour. When persons are relegated to living on gully banks what can we expect of them if they are deprived of so much of the amenities that are usually found elsewhere?” questioned Perrin.

The custos noted, however, that this can be corrected, as he pointed to the success story of Russia in the heart of Savanna-la-Mar. It was once known for crime and violence but he noted that social intervention such as the establishing of zones of special operations (ZOSOs) and other initiatives have resulted in a turnaround.

“We hardly hear anything about Russia anymore because the persons there obviously have been positively affected by the fact that certain things have been done for their benefit,” stated Custos Perrin. “It seems to me that if we are able to lift our people out of the morass that they have found themselves, to lift them and to give them a sense of identity and hope, then the matter of crime will also be resolved.”