"Is just a clean heart did it, a clean heart," says Joseph Bright (name changed), who has made it a principle in life not to harbour envious or bitter feelings towards other people.

To look at his always cheerful face, one would think that his childhood was a happy one.

But Joseph, now aged 50 and settled in St. Catherine with his wife and grown sons, reports a childhood filled with beatings and disappointment.

His life, he says, could have ended in disaster. At age six Joseph was given away by his father to a woman to be raised.

"Dem say she was my cousin," he recalls with scepticism.

The much older woman used him as a literal slave, causing him from this tender age to clean her three-bedroom house and live the life of a workhorse while his peers lived a carefree life.

"At Christmas time, my friends would dress up and go to merry-go-round, go to sport and I would past them in my old clothes with the black hog pan on my head, with food to feed hog."

No hair has ever grown in the middle of his head, he states, as he spent hours each day carrying, water, wood for the tin oven which his cousin used to bake products to sell, and trays laden with goods to sell.

He was sent to school for a few months beginning each January, and was kept home for the remainder of the year. His cousin, a vendor, ordered him to keep her house and yard clean, and by the time he was an adolescent, he was also washing her dresses.

Until he ran away at age 15 and went to live with his grandmother, he never knew the comfort of a bed, as she also forbade him to sleep on the mattress. Instead, he had to make his bed "underneath the bed".

His cousin would beat him frequently and badly, taking off his clothes before applying blows that he still remembers with pain. The only good thing about the woman, he says, was that she would feed him.

At his grandmother's house, Joseph Bright recalls, life was not as bad, but again he was used as a workhorse, taking cane to buyers without receiving a cent for his efforts.

But, he benefited, he said, from the friendship of older men who gave him good advice and also treated him as fathers would. "If I misbehaved they would hit me," he now recalls with a smile.

It was such good advice that led to his acquiring of a small pig, which he eventually sold and got enough funds to come to Kingston where he secured his first job at a supermarket.He worked hard and saved his money, but Joseph notes that in his early years as a working adult, he often reflected on his father's act of giving him away.

"One night I was smoking and thinking to myself that even if he had given me some chickens, my life would not be so hard. I said that I would never give him anything. But then, it come to me that he gave me life and for that I am grateful."

In Kingston, Joseph located his mother who was living with her other children and, after acquiring his first car, spent money ferrying her to and from the hospital where her leg was amputated because of diabetes.

He also ended up caring for his father, he said, and burying him all by himself. "Is the nine-night my other brother - his father's son - turned up. I just laugh," Joseph recalls.

He believes that his life has been blessed because of the way he has treated his parents.

"It's after I buried him (his father) that things just turned for me. I think it is because of the way I treat him."

- Avia Collinder