AT the "Jamaica Night" party to wrap up the 31st Caricom Heads of Government conference in Montego Bay Wednesday, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar arrived well into the session. She swept onto the dance floor almost immediately and began swirling around, to the beat of the golden oldies reggae and rock steady music from the live band.

In seconds, she was making rings around the conference and the party host, Jamaica Prime Minister Bruce Golding. Shortly thereafter she was up on the stage. She grabbed a microphone and was singing the lyrics of "One Love", the Bob Marley anthem that had formed part of her campaign repertoire for the May 24 general election that brought her to the prime ministership in Trinidad and Tobago.

She beckoned to the other leaders at the jump up and without a murmur they went. Next thing she was leading a chorus. She was moving the mic from one of her colleagues to the other, turning them into a bunch of willing accomplices. Grenada's Tillman Thomas, Dr Denzil Douglas of St Kitts and Nevis and Stephenson King of St Lucia made up the front line, Dr Douglas belting out the most lustily and distinctively of the group.

The Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister, the only woman in the club of leaders, had stolen the show. The audience loved it, and they loved her for what appeared to them to be her daring. And when this was over, she would go elsewhere with part of her entourage, to a club on the city's "hip strip".

Somehow, it appeared nearing the end of this visit, that Jamaica was destined to be the first place Kamla would visit after becoming Prime Minister.

After the days of tough talking, she was showing another side of herself.

Earlier that very day she had created speculation over the future regional security apparatus which had been the project of her predecessor in office to deliver. During late-night discussions the previous night on the subject, leaders had balked at a suggestion she made to put a US$2 tax on passengers travelling in and through the region from outside. Others complained it could ruin their tourism industry. Fine, she said. Trinidad and Tobago will not be able to fund the programme to the extent that had been promised. She said one of her officers wondered whether Port of Spain was not being seen an ATM machine. You just stick your card in and money comes out.

It turned out to have been the phrase of the summit, picked up two days later by the volunteers at a project called the "Mustard Seed". It is a non-profit organisation run by Trinidad-born Monsignor Gregory Ramkissoon, dedicated to making life easier for homeless and abandoned children, some of them with HIV/AIDS, others with severe mental and physical difficulties.

Kamla was moved almost to tears during a visit to that facility. Journalists as well as members of her delegation on the tour cried at what they were witnessing. She sat in a classroom with a group of pre-schoolers who sang to her "welcome to Jamaica, land of food and WATA. We glad fah yuh come ya, welcome to Jamaica."

Caregivers and volunteers at this facility are overwhelmingly women. This would have gone to the heart of the message this Prime Minister has been spreading, as she seeks to build a social edifice on the need to support and strengthen endeavours of women, in the work they do to raise and nurture children.

In a speech she delivered elsewhere at that facility, during the short appreciation ceremony to mark her visit, Kamla would ask Monsignor Ramkissoon and his staff of volunteers to "please indulge me if I say that every country should have a Mustard Seed".

She made a personal financial contribution to the work of this mission, telling the Monsignor "it may not be all you need, but it is a mustard seed that will grow".

If she hadn't shed tears at "Mustard Seed" on Friday, it may have only been because Kamla was determined not to repeat what happened on Thursday, when she led an emotional tour of the Mona Campus at the UWI, where she studied and then worked during the 1970s.

As part of the "homecoming" at the Girls High School, the current principal, Sharon Reid, read a recommendation given Kamla by the principal of the school at the time, when she wanted to move on from there, after a year.

It talked about how from that early, she had shown a willingness "to take advice", that she was "a friendly person who gets along well with others". Speaking afterwards, she said that school was where she began "to learn the bonds of sisterhood" and to inculcate the lesson that "as a woman you can do anything you put your mind to". Several of the girls she taught then had gone on to occupy positions of management and leadership, principal Reid said. More than a dozen of them were on hand to greet her. One of them, Denise Kitson, was beaming.

But it was her colleague host, Prime Minister Golding who best exemplified the force with which Kamla Persad-Bissessar talked, sang and danced her way into the hearts of many Jamaicans, on his her first "homecoming" after being elected Prime Minister.

When he spoke on the stage at the party at the Rose Hall Resort on MoBay, Golding said she had "turned this place up". He was unusually at a loss for words. Again, when he spoke the next day at the cement company function, he said it was "an extreme pleasure and an honour to have worked with her over the previous four days". He would say again later that evening. "She has so much passion for the causes that she has identified, she has been bubbling," he said.