Operation Friendship provides inner-city youth with skills training and remedial help in Mathematics and English. Skills learnt include woodwork, welding, bodywork (autos), printing and garment manufacturing. A course in information technology is also offered there. The organisation, located on the Kingston Industrial Estate, serves young residents of West Kingston communities primarily. The aim is to avert disaster, and simultaneously, create high achievers.

“Charitable work is Christian work,” Webster Edwards says about his quiet achievements over the years in the ageing and dusty, but imposing school. “It is not something you should parade or boast about. It ought to be intrinsic, flowing naturally.

Operation Friendship began ‘Operation Self-Help’ and started the commercial ventures involving the sale of Christmas cards and a line of diaries. From the income earned, the organisation has been able to meet eighty per cent of its recurrent expenses. The non-profit organisation is now the third largest producer of diaries.

Operation Friendship also manages the medical centre located near to the Coronation Market in Downtown Kingston. Users of the markets and residents downtown access general healthcare, family planning and dental care. The diaries also fund a significant portion of the recurrent expenses here. The charitable foundation has also entered into a partnership with the Heart Trust NTA ­ the national skills training institute. Heart assists with the payment of salaries to instructors and provides a small subsidy for training materials and equipment repairs.

The organisation aims to train and prepare students for self – employment. Operation Friendship is run by a board that has high expectations, and does not believe in a ‘hit or miss’ method of dealing with the problems of education and poverty. In the last information technology examinations, its students obtained 100 per cent passes along with some of the highest grades in the NCTVET examinations.

The first rate machinists produced by Operation Friendship now work in industry all over the island and the world. Several have migrated to the United States and Canada where they are reported to be doing well.

Hugh Sherlock, the academic philanthropist who also created Boys Town, started Operation Friendship more than 30 years ago. In 1961, a group of volunteers targeted Western Kingston ­ then in violent ferment, for economic and social assistance. ‘Operation Friendship’, created out of this focus, was intended to create a ‘bridge of friendship’ between the disadvantaged and those willing to help.