Mother of four struggles to survive after deportation

BY PETRE WILLIAMS-RAYNOR williamsp@jamaicaobserver.com

Sunday, August 01, 2010

AT 43 years old, Rosemarie has experienced unimaginable misery. Still, she refuses to lose hope.

In the last decade alone, she was imprisoned for trafficking cocaine, gone close to death's door, due in part to depression, and known what it is like to be homeless.

As though that were not enough, she has had to deal with the suffering of three of her four children who were left behind to fend for themselves while she was imprisoned in the United Kingdom for four years.

Dealing with the abuse of her children has been especially agonising, given her own painful youth. She still hurts from the fact that she did not receive an education like the rest of her siblings.

However, thanks to Hibiscus Jamaica, Rosemarie has a new lease on life. She was among the more than 20 women -- all deportees from the United States and the UK -- who last week graduated from a drapery-making, soft furnishing and business development course funded by the European Union and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), and administered by Hibiscus.

"Everybody is grateful for what Hibiscus has done for them," chirped Rosemarie who would only agree to the use of her middle name, because of fear of possible stigma.

"I am thinking of doing a great business from it. From all we have learnt, we can do great business from it and not just in Jamaica but all over the world," she said, clearly excited at the prospect.

"It is a new door opened. If it was not for them (Hibiscus), I wouldn't be thinking like this. If it wasn't for them, it would still be hand-to-mouth. But they have opened my eyes...It is the first step," she added, noting that she already had a business plan and was looking now to raise some capital.

But Rosemarie has not always had much to be hopeful about. In a recent interview with the Sunday Observer, she recalled the events that had brought her to where she is today. People she considered friends, she said, forced her into the drug trade, and out of fear for her children's safety and her own she went along with it.

"They threaten me and tell me that because I know too much of their business to bring them down, I have to go into it to prove to them that I won't let things out of the bag. So that is where I started," she said.

"I had to do it because I didn't want them to hurt my kids (all below 15 years old)," added the woman, who at the time was a few months pregnant with her fourth child.

She recalled how difficult it was for her to swallow the pellets of cocaine, all the while dreading how her unborn child could be affected.

"The man (in charge at the time) is a lawman and he walk in with a machete when they couldn't go down and he (asked) me if I want him to tek the machete and shove them down properly. At the time I couldn't do nothin' because he had the gun put down there on the kitchen counter and the machete tek up. He was trying to hit me with the machete one of the time when he see that they (the pellets) couldn't go down," Rosemarie said.

"They put a thousand pounds in my hand when everything was done and tell me to tell customs officer that I am going to shop," she recounted.

Rosemarie said the man's girlfriend accompanied her to the airport, expecting her to board the flight with her. But she never did. Rosemarie made the journey to England alone and was caught. Her first thoughts were of her children back home.

"They (the police) said I have a phone call. I called the people who got me involved in the trafficking and said 'look, I am in custody'. I wanted to talk to them first for them not to go after my children. I understand that they said I was lying so people took them (my children) from where they was," she said. "They said that I steal the money and the drugs, and that's not true. It is after a while when they did not see me that they said maybe it go so and they just leave it alone. Then my kids started to suffer."

Her older son and daughter lived with relatives of their father while her younger son lived with friends as his father had left Jamaica by then.

"My 10-year-old daughter, after about two years sat GSAT (Grade Six Achievement Test) and pass for high school and then fell out of school. The big one was going to high school, he dropped out of school. The baby became sick and some stranger have to be taking him to (Bustamante) Children's Hospital all the time," she said sadly, adding that her oldest child was soon denied a roof over his head by his father who accused him of being a homosexual.

"I went badly depressed in the prison. They were all in three separate places. The baby was with friends. The big girl was with her father's family. When the aunt asked the father for money, the father seh she should go an' ketch man... The big boy, he had to be on his own hustling and bustling. He go by my mother sometimes, I understand, and my mother sell dog food to give him (money). If it is not dog food, he doesn't get anything. So he was there, not going to school," Rosemarie said.

Eighteen months after the birth of her fourth child, a girl, in a Manchester prison, she had to wage a legal battle to keep her. It was a battle she eventually lost; her child was taken into foster care, which was itself a challenge.

It was while in prison that she learned of Hibiscus through a confidante. Hibiscus tracked down her oldest son and offered him help. Through Hibiscus' support, he was able to get back in school and managed to complete his high school education.

The other two children in Jamaica were not so lucky. It was not until she returned to the island in 2003, having served four years of an eight-year sentence that Rosemarie was able to reunite with all her children.

But she landed in Jamaica without any money to go beyond the gates of the airport.

"Some higglers were coming, I think off an American flight, and I told them 'I don't have a dollar, I'm coming from prison and I have a baby here'. All of them start taking $500 and give me. I got around $6,000 from them."

She paid a taxi to search for her mother's place where she had to sleep on the floor, Rosemarie recalled.

She first found her oldest child and he, in turn, helped her to find the other two children. Soon, the family was back together.

But there was no happy ending, not yet. They children got depressed and ill from getting wet when it rained and from sleeping on the floor.

When their health problems were resolved, Rosemarie's sister gave her a room from which she was soon evicted.

"She asked me to leave but I still didn't get anywhere to live and she throw me out. She put out the clothes and I put them back in because I still don't have anywhere to go," Rosemarie said, laughing now.

About nine months later, she got a place to live. To get money, she set pride aside and started begging old friends for help. Then she started selling jerk chicken, saving enough to lease a piece of land on which she built a one-room dwelling.

"The windows were battened up, the door was nailed up. We had to pull out the nail every morning and nail up back every night when we going to sleep," Rosemarie recalled. That room is now a three-bedroom house and home to her and three of her four children.

"All I have is my kids. My kids, they are my whole life. My kids are the ones who keep me going. If it was not for the kids, maybe I would die and gone. And I believe in God, too," she said.

"I am still hurting about my kids' suffering. That is why I still take anti-depression tablets. I am (also) trying to heal myself from my childhood. Right now my childhood (pain) is very strong. I want to put the past behind; I don't want to remember what happened," she said.

"I don't hate her (my mother) but I can't keep the bond too strong. (And) I don't trust men; I don't have a boyfriend..." she added, noting that she ran away from home as a teen and had been raped by three men.

"I want to heal myself, I want the past to go."

And between Hibiscus and her children, it is happening.

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