Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer

John Martin, a deportee and born-again Christian, talking to eighth grade students at the Mona High School in St. Andrew last week. Mr. Martin warned against substance abuse while addressing other issues facing young people. - Ricardo Makyn/Staff Photographer

SIX YEARS ago, when John Fitzgerald Kennedy Martin disembarked from an airplane at the Norman Manley International Airport in St. Andrew, he bore the classic symptoms of the deportee.

He was disillusioned, overcome by shame and even had thoughts of committing suicide. But then something turned his life around.

"I gave my life to Christ in 2001, but while I was doing that, I read an article in the Jamaica Observer by a gentleman named Mark Wignall," Mr. Martin, 42, told The Gleaner. "It was entitled, 'Government searches for role models and leaders', and it said nobody wanted to become a politician, everybody wants to become a deejay or a police."

His calling

Martin had no desire to pursue any of those professions. He saw his calling elsewhere.

"Me'd jus' waan talk to the youth dem," he said.

And that is exactly what he has been doing since 2001, counselling wayward youth in tough communities like Olympic Gardens, and at schools such as Mona High School, Spanish Town High School and his alma mater, Tivoli Gardens Comprehensive High School.

"I get very good response, when I ask them 'do you smoke or do you drink?' they raise their hands," he said. "And I ask them, 'why yuh tell me?' and they say, 'Mr. Martin, 'cause yuh show wi love'."

Deportees are often villified or ridiculed in Jamaica. Many of the 17,000 who have returned to the country in the past five years are blamed for a sudden rise in violence in various inner-city communities.

Little compassion

Others say they are shown little compassion when they are booted from the U.S., the United Kingdom or Canada. Most have been sent back to Jamaica after serving prison sentences.

In August, religious groups in New York City and Jamaica launched Land Of my Birth (LOB), an organisation whose aim is to reach out to deportees. They are processed and counselled in Kingston at Lockett Avenue and Laws Street once they arrive here.

"We do ourselves no good by further dehumanising these people," said Rev. Garnett Roper, one of the LOB's counsellors.

John Martin's life was typical of many ghetto youth in Jamaica. The sixth of nine children, the Trench Town-born Martin was a father of three by the time he was 24-years-old. Although he was an Informal Commercial Importer, he struggled to make ends meet. So, using false travel documents, he went to New York City in 1994.

He soon got involved with a Jamaican gang that ran crack/cocaine and marijuana from the New York City borough of Brooklyn to nearby Philadelphia and Cleveland, Ohio in the Midwest.

Arrested

His luck ran out after two years. He said he was arrested by federal agents at his Brooklyn apartment in 1996.

After three years and seven months in prison, he was deported. Back in Jamaica, he saw little hope for getting his life on track.

"I thought of taking my own life because I had lost everything," he said.

Life has taken on new meaning for John Martin since he became a Christian. So strong is his faith, he said, that one day while counselling residents in Cockburn Gardens he met the man whom, he said, murdered his nephew.

"A friend of mine showed mi the man an' I look at him an' give him a (Bible) tract," Mr. Martin recalled. "First thing come to my mind was, 'so my sister ban' har belly, yuh fi ban' yours to'," he said. "But my God said to me, 'vengeance is mine, leave him alone my son'. And I know His word is stronger."