Ronald Thwaites

“YOU CAN give me one a dem farm work card fi my boyfriend? If I get it, I will neva come beg you again ...” Betty is around 25. Her beautiful eyes pleaded recently.

She had come to see me accompanied by her three youngest children and, predictably, concluded by telling me that they “neva drink no tea” and wanted a food money. One look at them confirmed the need.

This isn’t a sob story. It is a narrative of the reality which the majority of Jamaicans face this week. Call it a ‘bleeding heart’ tale, if you wish. Yes. Exactly. It would help if more of us had hearts of flesh rather than hearts of stone in this time of national and personal crisis.

Telling of her life, by no means exceptional, is to humanise the stimulus efforts, the digitised applications and to chronicle to whom and how much of the money voted gets to the really needy.

Betty had come to my attention probably 12 years ago on East Queen Street where one of the southward lanes intersects. The strikingly goodlooking child, just becoming a woman, had come to her mother, a distraught, woebegone peddler of anything – rizzla, weed and sometimes fry-egg sandwiches at night – for some toilet paper to use the bathroom.

When I happened on the scene, the girl was getting a public, street-side, b-c cussing from her own mother for having used up more than the six squares of the tissue roll which was meant to last and share. No, that tracing cannot be repeated here.

Turned out that it was the girl’s monthly time. Her humiliation was as acute as her mother’s anger was angrily self-descriptive and the corner youths’ wagging tongues, cruel.