By Eulalee Thompson, Staff Reporter 
BOBBY (NOT HIS REAL NAME) was wandering the streets of Kingston, Portmore and Golden Spring, St. Andrew for nearly two years before he was rescued by an assertive outreach health team operating out of Bellevue Hospital in Kingston. He can't quite remember his age, maybe 30, but he thinks that he could even be 60; living on the streets, he said, he had no reasons to count the days or calculate his age.
His diminutive stature, soft-spoken but cultured British accent might have made him prime target for brutality from vagabonds on the prowl in the coarse sub-culture of the streets.
"People tried to murder me. They grabbed my hand and choked me and they tried to cut me with a knife. Young people and old people picked on me," Bobby recalled, as he was interviewed in more secure surroundings at the Bellevue Hospital. "The boys are wicked on the streets, some of them nearly tore off my head. They come like they know you but they attack you... they tried to drag my bag and slit after my neck."
It is really a remarkable story of how Bobby ended up on the streets of Kingston. Though sometimes incoherence got the better of him, he remembers clearly that he was five years old when his parents "sent for him" to join them in England, where they had been living and working for some time. He said that he lived with his parents, brothers and sisters, near Lords. He went to a comprehensive high school, then started to work in England "on a machine" for some time, about five years or so before he decided to go on holidays in France. At some point between his arrival in England at age five year and his departure for France, Bobby had experienced a mental illness, but he was well enough to holiday in France.
"I used to get social security...I had bought a second-hand car for 400 pounds and I started to save up my holiday pay to go on holiday in France. There was violence in Birmingham and my family thought it would be a good break for me to go to France... and I went to learn to speak French," he said.
He went on holidays but soon he thought of settling in France and he started looking for work.
"My family thought I was on holidays and that I would soon came back but I did keep in touch with family through telephoning my brother-in-law," Bobby recalled.
Plans for a wonderful life in France didn't work out however for Bobby he ended up instead living on the streets of France. Lived like that for about three years, his condition compounded by regression into mental illness. He was rescued by the Jamaican foreign mission in France but he did not or could not tell them that he had family in Britain and he was deported to Jamaica.
He landed at the airport in Kingston with only a bag of clothes and no fixed address to start another episode of life on the streets of Kingston, homeless and mentally ill. Bellevue Hospital's social workers are now trying to reunite Bobby with his relatives in England.
Bobby's life story is by no means particularly unusual, Dr. Maureen Irons-Morgan, Bellevue Hospital's senior medical officer said that homelessness is a multifaceted problem, with many underlying causes. An unpublished study of homelessness in Jamaica counted about 600 homeless persons on the streets of Jamaica. About 300 of them are living on the streets of Kingston and St. Andrew.
Dr. Irons-Morgan estimates that between 33 and 50 per cent of the homeless persons are
suffering from serious mental
illnesses.
Bellevue Hospital's health team (along with the Ministries of Health and, Local Government, the Salvation Army, representatives acting out of a subcommittee of the Kingston Restoration Committee, among others) have also been conducting their own research on homelessness. In a survey, one night in downtown Kingston, they counted 92 people sleeping on the streets 71 males and 20 females (the gender of one person was not stated). (There is another group of about 52 persons sleeping in night
shelters).
Among this group sleeping
on the streets of downtown Kingston, just over one-third of them were suffering from serious mental illnesses. Their ages ranged from 24 to 75 pointing to a group of mainly young
persons but with a fair size
of elderly persons.
Dr. Irons-Morgan said that most of the people living on the streets admitted to getting food on a regular basis from the feeding programmes in downtown Kingston, such as the ones run by the Salvation Army, the poor relief shelter or Food for the Poor. Some of them said that they did a little "hustling" such as "doing little things" for market people to earn money.
(Next week: Dr. Maureen
Irons-Morgan, Bellevue Hospital's senior medical officer, speaks of the new comprehensive strategy to tackle homelessness.)
Why are you homeless?
DR. IRONS-MORGAN said that in this downtown Kingston survey, the homeless persons were asked why they were living on the streets and their responses varied:
deportee status and I have no relatives living here and nowhere to go
some people had experienced problems with their housing for example, they were burnt out and they couldn't recover
some people had no employment
some people said that they had migrated from country to town to find jobs, the jobs didn't materialise or something else went wrong and they are still in Kingston but living on the streets
some people spoke of family conflicts or conflicts with their neighbours and legal problems that prevented them from returning home
some of them were substance abusers.
