Health

A US$9.9 million federal grant is helping Black churches across the United States turn their buildings into vaccination and screening centres, a model that shows how underused church space can serve communities.

The Jamaica Council of Churches offered member churches’ buildings as COVID-19 vaccination centres, with its president saying churches are places where many people feel safe, as a church leader rejected ‘mark of the beast’ claims.

Since 2017, a Seventh-day Adventist auditorium in Mount Salem has housed laboratory, antenatal and physiotherapy services moved out of Cornwall Regional Hospital. The minister praised the church, which said its own programmes had been squeezed.

Food For The Poor said COVID-19 job losses and evictions pushed housing requests above 100 a month in 2020, while it was building about 30 houses a month, and it launched a campaign to plant 10,000 fruit trees.

The JN Foundation gave 500 care packages in 2020 to Missionaries of the Poor, whose six homes in Kingston and St Andrew care for about 500 elderly, disabled and vulnerable people, as pandemic donations fell.

In April 2020 the Missionary Church Association of Jamaica’s Kendal Conference Centre near Mandeville was converted into a 32-bed facility for recovering COVID-19 patients, with the regional health director thanking the church for its help.

When fumes forced Cornwall Regional Hospital to move services in 2017, the Seventh-day Adventist West Jamaica Conference next door hosted dialysis, lab and clinic services, delaying its own skills centre by six months.

Hope Health Clinic, which serves more than 20,000 mostly uninsured patients a year, was set to move in 2016 into a new US$3.2 million complex built by the Good Shepherd Foundation on the grounds of Blessed Sacrament Church in Montego Bay.

Using money from a church luncheon and a volunteer carpenter, the Called to Push Ministry of Divine Church of God in Ocho Rios rebuilt cupboards in a bathroom on St Ann’s Bay Hospital’s male surgical ward, its first project there.