“Where Are Our People Going to Go?”: Fire Destroys a Missionaries of the Poor Home, Leaving 60 Wards Without a Roof

• A fire destroyed the Missionaries of the Poor’s Good Shepherd Home in downtown Kingston
• At least 60 wards and more than two dozen tenement residents lost their homes
• The office and chapel inside the home were burned
• Father Richard Ho Lung called on the nation to care for the poor

Around 10:30 on a Wednesday night in late August 2019, fire swept through a tenement yard at Fleet and Tower streets in downtown Kingston and destroyed the adjoining Good Shepherd Home, run by the Missionaries of the Poor. At least 60 wards and more than two dozen tenement residents were left homeless, the Gleaner reported.

Food, bedding and furniture were scorched, and the office and chapel inside Good Shepherd burned. In the tenement yard, appliances and back-to-school supplies were reduced to charred remains.

Days later, the order’s founder, Father Richard Ho Lung, then approaching his 80th birthday, spoke to the Gleaner about what the loss meant. “Where are our people going to go? Where are they going to live? All these people that got burned out. They look at the brothers as their brothers, and they look at me as their father, but what is going to happen to our people?” he said. The Missionaries of the Poor ran eight facilities, and he said those in their care had been looked after every day for 40 years. “We have buried many; we’ve built our own little coffins, and so forth,” he said.

He also appealed to the country as a whole. “We almost have like a fatherless nation, like a people without a shepherd. They don’t know where to go and what to do with their lives,” he said. “But we can only do so much. The nation has got to have the will to take care of the poor. A nation is really defined by the way it takes care of the least in the society, not by the way you take care of the richest.”

Looking ahead, he added: “Next month, I will be eighty years old, and I pray to God that the brothers can take over.”

The fire exposed how much of Jamaica’s housing for its most vulnerable people sits in old buildings run by religious orders, often in dense inner-city blocks next to tenement yards. When one of those buildings burns, dozens of people who have nowhere else to go lose their home at once. Ho Lung’s question about where they would live was a housing question as much as a pastoral one. Churches, the state and diaspora donors who value this work have a shared interest in fire safety, insurance and succession planning for the properties that make it possible.

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