Imagine you’re walking to work at a big, fancy university in the center of a bustling city. You’ve spent hours preparing your lecture on Urban Planning and you’re ready to face the sea of university students waiting in the lecture hall that morning. But as you walk to work you pass by a community of squatters, human beings living in such poverty that the very sight of them makes you sick to your stomach. Shacks made of cardboard and scraps of tin. Babies crying. A sea of humans surrounded by filth and garbage.

This was the place Gregory Ramkissoon, our guest on today’s episode of From Sparks to Light, found himself one morning in Kingston, Jamaica in 1978. A moment when he realized that he couldn’t look away. Couldn’t carry on as usual. Couldn’t act as though he hadn’t seen what he’d seen. He walked in to his classroom and gathered his students around. “Come with me,” he said, and he took them across the street, to the small community of squatters called Mona Common to see what they could do. And so began the story of Mustard Seed Communities. An NGO that has grown exponentially since those early days.

I have known Gregory since my college days, when we were both students at Boston College. Me, a young, naive undergraduate just struggling to find my footing and he, a wise graduate student in Philosophy and Theology who’d already have lived a life and seen things I could never have imagined. He is, to me, the personification of joy. He is bubbly and playful and whether we were sitting in the Eagles Next cafeteria at BC or chatting over lunch or dancing in the streets of Boston, he always had a knack for making me laugh. We talk about paying attention to the world around you. About the lessons he learned from his mom and dad about how important it is to start right where you are.  And although Msgr Gregory is now Catholic, he wasn’t always. He was raised in a Hindu family and schooled in the Muslim faith. He has an eclectic soul, filled with a kind of generosity of spirit that has always inspired me to want to be the best version of myself I can be.

Gregory Ramkissoon was born in Trinidad, West Indies as the 5th of 13 children. He holds a degree in Urban Planning, as well as Master’s degrees in Philosophy and Theology from Boston College. In 1978, Gregory Ramkissoon started Mustard Seed Communities (MSC). a home for a handful of the children who had been living on the streets of Kingston. 

In 1984, when he was ordained a Catholic priest, he knew he wasn’t called to a parochial vocation. Instead he saw the need to address poverty in developing countries and dedicated himself to continuing the work he’d begun several years before. 

Now, what started as a small home for a few dozen children in the streets of Kingston, Jamaica, has grown into homes, schools, and small business enterprises in Jamaica, Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Malawi and Zimbabwe. 

To learn more about Msgr. Gregory or support the work of Mustard Seed Communities, please check out their website.