From a place called LOVE
Thousands of Jamaicans opt to parent children through adoption, foster care
“It is what makes me happy, and whatever makes me happy, I will go to the ends of the earth to get it right. As long as people will benefit and their lives can be much better than what it ” actually is, I am willing.
JAMAICA NEEDS more people like ‘Aunty Lorna’ – upstanding adults who give selflessly to the nation’s most needy children.
In a state of heightened peer pressure, a COVID-stricken economy, disrupted education, and marauding criminals – most times indifferent to the devastation they bring to children’s lives – these guardian angels are imperative.
Yet, those like Aunty Lorna, Jenave Darby, and 976 foster parents islandwide often go unsung – at least to those outside the 1,200 children whose lives depend on them each day – not to mention those whom they have opted to adopt full time. For these children, these adults are real heroes, saving and transforming lives, sometimes with a single valiant act.
“I just get total satisfaction from helping others. It is what makes me happy, and whatever makes me happy, I will go to the ends of the earth to get it right. As long as people will benefit and their lives can be much better than what it actually is, I am willing,” smiled ‘Aunty’ Lorna Duncan of the Trench Town Seventh-day Adventist Church, who, for years, has been at the helm of a vibrant soup kitchen in that hard-pressed, yet historical, community.
That kitchen feeds approximately 150 persons weekly, and through church-community initiatives, it has rewarded and fêted hundreds more with back-to-school treats, concerts for the elderly, and COVID-19 care packages since last year. Still, she wishes she could do more.
ACT OF VALIANCE
Perhaps Lorna’s biggest act of valiance, however, the one that continues to fill her heart today, was made 18 years ago, when she adopted young Danielle Cox, now a student of the Immaculate Conception High School.
With that single act, Duncan not only saved Danielle’s life, but also tossed a lifeline to her mother, Tenuke Doyley, who at the time was a desperate pregnant 15-year-old attending the church. Now, despite all the challenges she endured in the early years, Cox is now Duncan’s beacon of pride.
“She (Tenuke) is a beautiful person, inside and out, and when she fell in this predicament, even though in your mind as an adult you are saying, ‘If you are doing adult things, then you must be prepared for the responsibility ...’, but it is not always that way, and in my heart, I just could not allow this child to go this direction,” she told The Sunday Gleaner in reflecting on how she assisted Doyley, whose story was published last week.
“’Ten’ was a smart girl, but her background was one she had very little control of,” said Duncan of Doyley, who, at the time, fended for herself while living at an aunt’s house.
Months later, after countless visits to the state home Doyley was staying, and after yielding to a request from the young mother, Duncan became Danielle’s legal guardian. It was a decision beneficial to all parties as Duncan, who is without children of her own, has raised Danielle with an undying love.
‘SWEET LITTLE GIRL’
“The whole nurturing aspect of it wasn’t new to me; God is good and my [now-deceased biological] father also played a very important role in her life,” she said behind a reflective chuckle. “When she was growing, he would say to me, ‘Lorna, this is a sweet little girl. Don’t you ever slap her ‘cause people will hear her crying and assume you are beating her because it is not your child’.”
There have been only t wo instances where Duncan said she has had to discipline Danielle physically. Other than that, “She is an excellent child.”
“We need more of this love for our children; and my advice is that if you are in a position to help someone, especially a child in need, just do it. Don’t think twice about it because you never know the impact you will make on that child’s life,” said Duncan, now retired.
In Buck Common, a rough settlement in May Pen, Clarendon, Jenave Darby needs no certificate nor invitation to spread her motherly cloak outside her gang of children and grandchildren living inside their humble yard. Here, unemployment, illiteracy, and gang recruitment are bedfellows, and it is often fearless women like Darby whose keen wisdom undoubtedly breaks the frolic.
To many youngsters and their parents, she is known as ‘Mama’, taking care of all who have popped up over the years for a plate of her nightly dinners or her cornmeal porridge in the mornings before school. Her love and support for them remain undaunted, despite losing all her possessions in two recent fires, the latter days before Mother’s Day, and also suffering a stroke in-between.
“I feel cut up about it because the greatest challenge is that I can’t find anything for them to eat,” she slurred, pointing to some of the children around her and their differing predicaments. “We can’t cook any pot to give them again and that is what bothers me the most.”
“I know what it is to wash people dutty clothes to carry food come to give them at evening time. Many times, I have to save the money to send them to school, but it is better dem eat. If they don’t eat, me can’t happy,” said Darby, noting that rebuilding a roof over her grandchildren’s head would be her greatest joy.
Since the fires, they have been moving from one place to the next, she said.