By Nadine Wilson-Harris
Lurline Lindo is one of thousands of Jamaican mothers who have lost a child to gun violence, but with the help of a support group and her strong faith in God, she is slowly healing from what is a parent’s worst nightmare.
Lindo’s only daughter was killed in January 2019, a few days after her 19th birthday. A week prior, a pastor had told her to go on a seven day fast, but she didn’t realise it was to strengthen her for the dark days ahead. Since then, going to church and joining the support group, Mother’s United Against Gun Violence, has helped her cope.
Mother’s United Against Gun Violence was started by the Peace Management Initiative (PMI) in 2018 to provide coping strategies and counselling for mothers in mourning, but COVID-19 and the withdrawal of government funding from the PMI have impacted the sustainability of the programme.
Although the group no longer gathers for its once-monthly meetings, Lindo, a Spanish Town resident, is still benefiting from the skills and strategies she acquired from the training sessions.
“We learnt a lot of things. We learnt how to cope through the process and we learnt how to push out our anger. We learnt how to make wreath, floral arrangements, and how to build a business. We learnt how to do a lot of things,” Lindo, who has two other children said.
Lindo is now making wreaths to earn an income, and noted that many others have started a business utilising the skills they acquired at the time.
“The first time I got the homework on how to build a wreath, I said, ‘I can’t do it’ and she (the trainer) said you need to do it because you need to go through this process, and I said, ‘ok, I am going to try,” recounted Lindo.
“When I made the first wreath, nobody couldn’t believe it, and I elevated myself, and now I have a little small business in it,” she said.
Acting executive director of the PMI, Berthlyn Plummer, explained that the programme disintegrated as funding dried up, but due to the bond that was forged, the mothers have been meeting periodically. Plummer, a social worker and a Justice of the Peace, said the PMI still helps where it can.
“We do some work with them. We did some training with them earlier this year, and sometimes when there is a crisis within the group, we respond still with counselling and other psycho-social support,” she told the Freedom Come Rain newspaper.
There is a Mothers United Against Gun Violence chapter in Spanish Town and in Kingston. With the understanding that the loss of a child can be one of the most traumatic experiences for a mother, the organisers placed a lot of focus on group and individual therapy.
Plummer said there are plans to restructure the PMI, but she does not know when this will happen. The group suffered a huge blow to its community intervention programme when it was forced to pull out of 40 volatile communities across the country in early 2020. This was because the Citizen Security and Justice Programme, which provided majority funding, said it had to significantly reduce its financial support.
The PMI indicated then that it could not continue its violence-interruption initiatives, which had prevented conflicts from escalating in troubled communities in St. James, Kingston, St. Catherine, Westmoreland, and Hanover. The group, which was formed in 2002, has been chaired by varying members of the church community over the years, with Bishop Herro Blair being at the helm for 11 years before his resignation in 2013.
Apart from the Mothers United Against Gun Violence group, the PMI also had a Trauma Response Programme which sought to intervene in gun-related conflicts across the country.
National Security Minister Dr. Horace Chang told parliament in late 2019 that social intervention programmes like the PMI were not working. There has been empirical evidence from experts in the field of violence prevention that it has indeed succeeded in achieving its mandate.
Dr Chang said at the time that the government would instead invest money in rehabilitating police stations, improving the investigative capabilities of the police force, and improving social amenities in communities.
Since then, there has been the rollout of several Zones of Special Operations and the declaration of a State of Emergency in various parishes to stem gun violence. However, the government is coming under increasing pressure to get a handle on crime in the wake of several triple and quadruple murders in the last few months, with the recent one being a quadruple murder in Trelawny on October 9.
For those like Lindo who have been left behind to mourn the loss of loved ones taken by the gun, initiatives like the Mothers United Against Gun Violence provide an oasis.
“They should bring it back in,” she said, before adding, “When we are in the group and come together, we share each other’s burden, we listen to one another, we encourage one another, and we strengthen one another.”