Community is a blessing—the people you know, the people you meet each day, the ones you share your life with. Canaan Heights is a good community, like so many in Jamaica, neighbors helping each other, but all of them quite poor. This woman lived in a one room shack typical of the area, built out of scrap, with no running water or electricity. When the rains came, as they do every day this time of year, she huddled with her children in one bed and put pots around to catch the water leaking through the roof.
Then a group of people from came down from the USA and met the people of Canaan Heights. They could not believe that people live like this, and they were moved to do something about it. Through Food For the Poor they are now building 65 houses for people in the community, no small feat, but the only honest response to seeing what life was like there. The new houses are next to the old houses, as you can see in the photo below. This way the community is not disrupted, just elevated. Neighbors still live by each other but in houses that are safe and dry.
On each roof there is also a small solar panel generating enough electricity to light the house at night and to charge cell phones.
Visiting the Canaan Heights community is now a real blessing. The people are so thankful and their lives are so much better. All it takes is for enough people to care. Seeing tranformations of communities like this is what keeps me on the road preaching for Food For the Poor.
You can read more about this project at http://www.foodforthepoor.org/newsroom/archive_12/hope-gala-comitee-jam… .