Fix the family, fix Jamaica!
THEY ADHERE to different religious teachings, but participants in last week’s interfaith conference put on by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at Jamaica in Old Harbour, St Catherine, agreed that Jamaica needs to fix its broken families if the country is to tame the crime monster.
“If a man lives with a child and a woman, and during pregnancy and after birth he does not provide for the child, it is like the man has killed that child. You have killed that child physically, morally and spiritually,” argued Idrees Ahmed from the Ahmadiyya Muslim movement in Jamaica.
“Killing does not mean you are stabbing the child. If you don’t feed and educate the child properly you are killing him, and you are the one who is going to suffer,” added Ahmed, as he argued that broken, fatherless homes is often a catalyst for Jamaica’s criminals.
“You have destroyed that child and now he has no option but to go into the street where he forms the roots (of crime). But when you take good care of that child: you feed the child, you educate the child, you intro- duce that child to the fear of God, it will be very difficult for him to go out into the streets,” added Ahmed, as he addressed the gathering of Christians, Muslims and Rastafarians inside the mosque in Old Harbour.
For its third annual interfaith conference, participants of different genders were allowed to sit beside each other inside the other too much and it has to stop.
“If you elevate the mind then you can heal the body. This is the human nature,” said Avadhuta.
Rastafarian Heru Ishakamusa Menelik, president of the Rastafarian Innity Council, pointed to poverty as the highest push factor for the breakdown of families in Jamaica, and urged the Government to do more for inner-city families.
“There is unequal sharing of the country’s resources. Ninetynine per cent of the crime is committed by people from the inner-city communities. When you look at the broken families you have one mother and her children with no father.
“In most cases, the father has been killed in either gang war or political war and it is the mother alone. So the children will go astray,” he argued.