SANTA CRUZ, St Elizabeth — Jacquline Baker, a mother of two, recalls that six years ago her husband lost his sight and was no longer able to work.

It’s been a traumatising time for her and her family these last few years, as they try to make do with all the odds against them. The onset of the novel coronavirus pandemic since March 2020 has only made things worse.

Yet, refusing to beg or demean herself in anyway, she is slowly carving out a niche as a cook.

“I work two days per week… cooking and selling to people around, mostly breakfast… but it’s hard,” she told the Jamaica Observer.

The resident of Brighton, just outside Santa Cruz, explained that she has built a clientèle while concentrating on such meals as ackee and saltfish, callaloo and saltfish, chicken (curried and brown stewed), and hog head.

She was very pleasantly surprised last week, just before Christmas, when a man she hardly knew visited her home and presented her with a small, gift-wrapped bag of groceries and an envelope with a small cash donation.

‘It wasn’t a lot but it helped… I am so grateful,” she said.

“We have to be grateful for small mercies… some people only want big things but you have to be grateful for the small mercies too,” she added.

The benefactor, 63 year-old sound engineer Glenroy Miller, doesn’t consider himself Santa Claus.

“Nothing like that,” he said with a laugh when the Observer caught up with him by telephone and asked the direct question.

“It’s just a thing I do this time of year and… each year it seems to get a little bigger,” Miller said.

He explained that a few years ago it dawned on him that there were a few people he was aware of who could use some help, especially at Christmas time.

“So I would make up a package or two with little rice, flour and other bare essentials, just to make sure that on Christmas Day they can look at a plate [with food] – nothing to strain my pocket too much,” he said.

His younger brother and a female friend joined in the project and the “next thing” he knew, last year he was presenting 20 bags of groceries to “needy people”. This year the number jumped to 30. The informal gift project got even bigger last week because his mother joined by making small cash donations, properly enveloped, to match each grocery package.

“We ended up with even more envelopes than grocery packages, so some people got envelopes who didn’t get any packages,” he said.

Miller has no fixed criteria for coming up with beneficiaries. He confesses that most of those he presents with gifts he doesn’t even know by name.

He spoke of one roadside fruit vendor whom he had become used to seeing, but then, two years ago she was no longer there. On enquiring, he was told that she was ailing and too frail to continue her business. That fruit vendor immediately made his Christmas gift list.

“Some people, somebody recommend on the basis that they are in need… and sometimes there are little things, like you are going along and you see a home and you know that the people who live there need help…” he said.

Miller is particularly moved by stories of hard-working people who fall on hard times because of ill-health and misfortune.

“These are things that can happen to any of us,” he said. “Those are people we (his relatives and friend) try to help in our own little, small way,” he added.

He is wary of able-bodied people who make it a habit of begging for a living or who try to con others into giving them money.

“If I can possibly avoid it, those people won’t get anything from me,” he said.

Baker underlined the latter sentiment. “A lot of time there are people who really need help who don’t get it, and sometimes people who tek help, don’t need it,” she said.