WESTERN BUREAU – Ella Reddyng and her three children have become a familiar sight on the streets of Montego Bay.

The 34- year-old woman, who sometimes crawls on her hands when the pain in her bad leg is too much to bear, begs for a living.

She had a wheelchair once, but it has long fallen apart, just like her life has come apart at the seams.

She says she is originally from Spanish Town in St Catherine, but lived on relatives’ lands in Stonehenge, St James for a few years. But two years ago that one-room home was gutted by fire, leaving her and her six children (two girls and four boys) without a roof over their heads.

She went back to St Catherine, hoping relatives would help, but they could not and she returned to the now-familiar western resort city. That was when Reddyng and her children ended up on the streets.

Then it got worse. She was hit by a car and was unable to walk for almost three years.

“I was in a wheelchair for two years and six months and because the wheelchair mash up I had to come out of it,” she told the Observer. “Sometimes I have to lean on my son for walking and sometimes I have to use a stick.”

After the traffic accident, she said, the father of five of her children ended their relationship, taking two of the children with him.

Now, she and four year-old Timmy, nine year-old Lando and 11-year-old Dilinger use the sea as their shower and a hole in the sand as their toilet. They have become familiar with the insults hurled at them as they beg along St James and Barnett streets in Montego Bay.

“Sometime they give me (money) and sometime some people curse me. They tell me I must go look work, but if I was never sickly with my foot I would go and work,” said Reddyng.

When the family is not sleeping on the piazzas of business places, they can be found getting some shut-eye on the beach – but sleeping can be dangerous, Reddyng has learnt.

“About 12 (midnight) when all the children were sleeping, a man came to me and said he wanted to carry me home, but I told him I was not coming with him. He tried to force me to come with him but I told him that I was not coming with him and after some time he walked away,” she said of one of many harrowing experiences.

Tired of the dangers of the streets and longing for something better for her and her children, the physically challenged woman tried to get help from the St James Poor Relief Department. She said she asked them to help her get a house but was told that first she needs to have the land on which the house will be built.

Reddyng is not a landowner.

The parish’s Inspector of Poor Jeremiah Duhaney told the Observer that he has heard of Reddyng’s plight and wanted to help, but had been unable to locate her.

Duhaney added that as a short-term measure, the Poor Relief Department would organise for her and her children to get meals at the City Spirit Foundation on Orange Street. The family would then be further assessed, he explained, to determine if they was suitable for accommodation at the night shelter at Albion. “She could not go there just like that,” Duhaney said.

And he confirmed that the homeless woman needs to have land before she can qualify for a Food for the Poor home to be built for her and her children.

Already battling with the uncertainty of the source of her next meal and whether an appeal for help will be met with kindness or cruelty, that is not an issue that Reddyng will waste any time thinking about right now.

She has, however, thought about the possibility of being a vendor. “I don’t decide to beg forever, if I get some money I would sell,” she said.

But that also has its drawbacks.

“But next thing, if I start to sell on the road police would take away my things and I would start to suffer again,” she said.