“You Don’t Rent a Place to Have a Nursing Home”: An 85-Year-Old Anglican Priest Came Home and Built One for 40 Seniors

• Rev Lilla Martin left Jamaica at 16 and lived in England and the US for decades
• She returned in 1997 and opened the Allibecca retirement home in Mandeville in 2001
• The three-storey home is licensed for up to 40 seniors
• She warned against running nursing homes on rented premises

Reverend Lilla Martin left Chapelton, Clarendon at 16 for England in the 1950s. She later spent close to 30 years in the United States, earning university degrees and training at a theological seminary. In 1997 she came home to Jamaica with a plan, and by 2001 the Allibecca retirement home was open on Villa Road in Mandeville, Manchester.

The Jamaica Observer profiled the 85-year-old Anglican priest in April 2023. It reported that caring for her own mother, Rosette McLean, inspired the home. The three-storey facility can hold up to 40 seniors. It is licensed by the Ministry of Health and staffed by nurses and nurses’ aides, with a doctor on call. Before COVID-19 it housed about 30 people, and its residents included a centenarian and a 99-year-old.

“We try to do the best we can for our duplicate mothers and fathers,” Martin said. “There is a lot of love here.”

She was blunt about property. At the time, 20 elderly residents had recently been evicted from a nursing home in St Catherine, which she called awful. Martin said such homes should not operate from rented buildings. “You don’t rent a place to have a nursing home. That is nonsense,” she told the paper. Her point was that owning the building protects residents from being put out, and she worried that the St Catherine case could lead to tougher rules that hurt responsible operators too.

Martin’s story brings together three things that matter to Jamaican returnees: savings built abroad, a calling, and a building owned outright. As Jamaica’s population ages, and as more members of the diaspora think about care for parents back home, her warning about rented premises is worth noting. For churches and returning residents planning homes for the elderly, secure title and ownership are not paperwork details. They decide whether vulnerable residents can stay put when a landlord changes his mind.

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