Independently Speaking By Brent Olson

Mr. Percy

At 5:37 this morning, instead of wasting time sleeping, I was thinking about Mr. Percy. When we were in our mid- to late-20s, my wife and I were youth group leaders in our church. The members of our first junior high school class are now well over half a century old, so it was a while ago. For reasons much longer than you’d be willing to listen to, we started leading work projects to Jamaica, mostly repairing hurricane damage.

I wouldn’t go without my wife, and she wouldn’t leave our kids behind, so these trips turned into quite the expeditions. Over the span of a decade, we led groups of juniors and seniors four times. Because we were determined to not leave anyone behind, our preparations involved quite a bit of fundraising so the cost wouldn’t be a burden.

Consequently, a whole generation of adults old enough to have children in college probably still remember the recipe for hot dish for 100, due to so, so many congregational dinners.

The specific trip I’m remembering was to a small Methodist church in the town of Oracabessa, on the north coast. Not really a tourist destination, at least not back then, but it was where Ian Fleming, the author of the James Bond books, had built his home. I know this because we stayed, all thirteen of us, in a run-down resort next door.

It had been abandoned because instead of a white sand beach, stark black rocks led down to the Caribbean — although the plan was to renovate and reopen when they had enough money. The bad news was that it was kind of run down. The good news is that if it hadn’t been run down, we wouldn’t have been able to afford it. There was no beach, but it did have lizards.

Our purpose for being there was to help build a Sunday School addition to the church. The main structure was up, but we worked on pouring a cement floor and installing windows. The job was run by a local contractor everyone called Mr. Percy. In the midst of a job, his cement workers were known to say, “Show us mercy, Mr. Percy!”

Everyone would laugh, but there was no mercy, which in my experience is common with concrete contractors.

I was thinking about a couple things when Mr. Percy popped back into my head after an absence of a decade or two. First, while he was a skilled and respected builder in his community, there wasn’t that much money in it. He had children he wanted to keep in good schools, so every few years he would travel to Canada to work in canning factories during the fall harvest. He’d stay with about 20 other guys in an apartment, save every dime, and go home after a few months with enough money to fulfill his obligations for the next couple years. What made this interesting was that in Oracabessa, he was an employer with a good reputation, but when he left Jamaica, he was just another black guy with an accent who ran seasonal machinery for minimum wage. He told me a story about working in a factory that was packaging green peas. One day he noticed the mechanism that put the lids on was malfunctioning. He called the foreman over and said, “Excuse me, mon, I think your machine is out of adjustment.”

The foreman responded, “Well, we’re not paying you to think, are we?”

Mr. Percy thought about the size of his paycheck and agreed that the foreman had made a solid point, so he didn’t say anything else, even when he spent the next morning dumping pallets of ruined peas out of leaking cans.

The other thing I remember is that we didn’t see that much of Mr. Percy. He’d show up to get us going and then leave us working under the guidance of his foreman, Joe. Turns out he had several other jobs going on at the same time that he needed to pay a little more attention to since he was doing the church job cost-free. I mentioned that it was a good thing he was doing for his church.

He said, “Oh, this isn’t my church.”

He noticed my expression, shrugged and said, “It’s not my church, but it is my community.”

That’s enough to keep a person from wasting their time sleeping at 5:37 in the morning.

Copyright 2025 Brent Olson