A forlorn-looking woman standing outside her small shack near Mandeville, Jamaica, caught the eye of the van driver who was taking Grant Rabuse and nine others from the archdiocese to a mission site in the south-central Diocese of Mandeville.

The group stopped that day in early 2016 and learned that the woman suffered from HIV-AIDS, and that she and her 7-year-old daughter had no food for the day. The chickens that a Catholic organization had given them as a source of income had been stolen.

Six years later, Rabuse, 60, remains surprised at how freely the woman shared her story with him and the other visitors. She welcomed them into her home with a dirt floor and no windows, without expecting anything from them.

“It was nothing that any of us would say you’d showcase, but I think she was still proud that she had this home for her daughter,” said Rabuse, a parishioner of St. Joseph in West St. Paul. “It was still her home that she welcomed us into. It was very eye-opening and humbling to see how some people live and how they enjoy what they have, what little they do have.”

Rabuse spent a week in the Mandeville diocese meeting and serving residents on an immersion trip organized by the Center for Mission in the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis, which works to promote the missionary life of the Church and coordinate mission outreach in the archdiocese.

As he visited schools, health clinics, orphanages, a nursing home and helped build a house, Rabuse saw the Jamaican people’s poverty and suffering but also their joy, generosity and strong family bonds.

Rabuse decided to take his first mission trip to Jamaica after hearing his sons tell of the joy they saw in people they encountered on mission trips to Central and South America.

Whether visiting elderly residents at a nursing home run by the Missionaries of Charity in St. Elizabeth, or touring schools and meeting school leaders and community members, Rabuse said he sought to see Christ in the people and to witness God working in their lives.

“I think (our) witnessing down there was just being present to these people and seeing a day in the life in the community, whether it was in some of the schools or hospitals or St. John Bosco,” (Boys Home run by the Sisters of Mercy in Hatfield, Jamaica), he said. “For somebody to actually take interest in them was a pretty nice thing for them to experience as we all sat with different groups down there and had some good conversations.”

Jamaicans’ joy was evident, from the grateful widow for whom Rabuse helped build a small, wood frame home, to members of a lively, packed Sunday Mass congregation who passed their babies to the Americans to hold. Their joy appeared to come from having priorities more focused on family and relationships than material things, Rabuse said.

Since meeting Jamaicans in their communities, Rabuse is more conscious of being kind and appreciative to people he meets when vacationing in the Caribbean. He plans to return to Jamaica on another mission trip in early 2023.

And after meeting Missionaries of Charity in Jamaica, he’s now helping the Twin Cities community of sisters with woodworking and building projects.

Jamaicans’ focus on family and sharing and helping each other through problems is something Americans could learn from, Rabuse said.

“I guess it was very transferrable to see that — whether you’re in a rich country, (such as) America, or Jamaica — that everybody has a cross to bear and struggles in life,” he said. “Probably we in America try to mask more of that, and hide that, to make everything look like it’s rosy.”