Family of seven sleeping in one room since Melissa

One month after Hurricane Melissa reduced their three-bedroom home to rubble, the Smith family has yet to recover.

Seven of them are now crammed into a single unfinished room in the hills of Troy, Trelawny, sleeping on two thin mattresses with no water, no electricity, and no plan to rebuild. The house, built in the 1980s and inherited by 69-year-old farmer Joseph Smith, once held three generations under one roof. Today, only broken blocks and twisted zinc remain.

"Three bedroom and dining hall and kitchen and verandah just gone," Smith said, surveying the wreckage. "Is the first time in mi life mi sleep in a house wid no light, no proper roof, and mi cya do nothing bout it."

During the height of the storm, Smith, his wife Julie, his daughter Theressa, her two children, and another daughter, Stacyann, and her children, sheltered under a mattress in the last standing corner of the house.

"We couldn't come out in a the storm, the wind did wicked man. It probably would a kill we off," Theressa recalled. The next morning, they dried the mattress in the sun. It remains one of only two they sleep on today.

With the original house destroyed, the family moved into a nearby one-room structure that Smith began building in 2022. It was intended to be a new home, but construction stopped when money ran out. The room has no proper windows, no finished walls, and no door that seals.

"It nuh finish," Theressa said. "After the storm we affi use ply and zinc and back up the window and go in there. After the storm, mi have nowhere else fi go." Inside, the seven family members share the small space, storing clothes on concrete blocks and cooking on a coal stove outside. With school closed to them and no transportation or devices, their education has been on pause since the storm.

"The pickney dem out a school long time now," she told THE WEEKEND STAR. "Mi miss mi own space. Mi miss mi bed."

The family has no piped water. The nearest spring is almost a mile away, over a steep hill, and they boil whatever little they can carry home "fi boil out the germs," according to Smith.

There is no electricity either. To keep their phones charged, the family pays a neighbour $200 per phone, spending $800 to charge four phones once or twice a week.

Behind the property, the farmland that once sustained the family has also been wiped out, leaving Smith without income.

"When mi look pon the land and see everything mash up, mi heart sink. A deh so mi future did deh," he said. "Mi lose all mi yam and all mi banana."

With no harvest to sell, rebuilding has stalled. "Mi build this place little by little, now mi affi start all over," he said. "Mi need help. One man cya build back from this alone."

Weekly poor relief packages provide basic food items, but the family says their most urgent need is construction material to secure the room they are living in.

"A nuh luxury we want," Joseph said. "We just trying fi finish the little one room first. We need a roof over we head."

Inside the room, Julie sits quietly. According to the family, she has barely spoken since the house collapsed.

"Mommy don't talk much again," Theressa said. "She just stare. The storm tek more than house, it tek her spirit."

Residents say many homes across Troy were damaged, but none as severely as theirs. A neighbour watching from the fence said simply, "Plenty people get damage, but dem get it the worst."

As rainy weather threatens to return, the patched zinc on the unfinished room shudders in the wind, a reminder that the family remains vulnerable.

"If rain come hard again, mi don't know if this can manage," Smith said.