Don't separate families, Mahfood pleads

Chairman of Food for the Poor, Andrew Mahfood, yesterday issued a call to action for Jamaicans to unite with the charity organisation to stop the forcible removable of children from their homes by the State in cases where they live in deplorable conditions.

"Please, before this is ever done again, call Food for the Poor and we will get a home erected for that family, so children are never removed from their parents," Mahfood said yesterday during the weekly meeting of the Rotary Club of Kingston at the Altamont Court Hotel in New Kingston.

Mahfood's call came during the acceptance speech for a US$3,600 cheque from the club as its contribution for the first of five homes to be built by Food for the Poor under the Rotarians' Home for the Homeless project.

He called into question decisions by persons who determine the best course of action for individuals with whom they have little in common.

WHAT IS HOME?

"What does it mean to you to go home?" he asked, catching Rotarians off guard. "Everyone in this room will go to our respective homes. What does that mean to you, to go home? That warm feeling - hot dinner, hot shower, a bathroom, a kitchen, a husband, a wife, a family, your air condition?" Mahfood quizzed before highlighting contrasting conditions which are a way of life for too many Jamaicans.

"How many of our people will not go home?They will go to that place that has tarpaulin for walls; that has zinc roofs that leak when it rains; they can't shower; they have to go outside to the bathroom out in the bush; there's no light to study; there's no TV and there is no bed!"

He continued: "Or they wake up in the morning and they have children taken away from them and placed in State care because the home is deemed not habitable. Deemed not habitable by whom? By those of us who have homes?

"Before this ever happens again, please call Food for the Poor ... ."