Dear Reader,

I first of all want to offer my personal condolence to the families, friends and to the communities which suffered the loss of lives as a result of tropical storm Nicole. I am especially heartbroken about the four children who perished when their house was washed away along the Sandy Gully, and the five-year-old who died when a tree fell on top of her family’s house and crushed her while she was in bed. From fires to storms, our country continues to be unable to protect the smallest and most vulnerable in our society – our children.

Clearly, Nicole caught all of us by surprise, and left the country completely unprepared for the intensity of the rain and wind that accompanied the catastrophe. Actually, there are questions to be asked about the accuracy and the warnings that ought to be standard procedure, particularly with the types of technological advances we now have in meteorology. For some reason, we seem to fall down time and time again in reporting concisely the potential impact of severe weather systems threatening the island. In this case, while there were general flash flood warnings, there were no aggressive alerts about the intensity of the storm. I suspect that lives could have been saved if the warnings were more accurate and more widely publicised.

When all is said and done, the story about the loss of life and the widescale dislocations when natural disasters hit our country is largely a story about the poor in Jamaica. That’s because it is the poor who live on gully banks and river beds. It is the poor who live in communities where the poor garbage collection leads to gullies being used as receptacles and subsequently to clogging and flooding, and it is the poor whose sub-standard homes make them especially prone to death and serious dislocation when natural disasters strike.

At the root of the problem is squatting – the term used to describe the phenomenon in which our brothers and sisters find themselves in such a severe state of destitution that they settle on unoccupied land, regardless of the environmental hazards. The homeless know that there is no competition for riverbank and gully real estate, neither is there any ongoing official monitoring of riverbank settlements. I imagine that when you have nowhere to live, the availability of an undisturbed and uncontested piece of land far outweighs the risk of being washed away in a flood.

Gully banks are the other parcels of real estate available to the poor who occupy them almost exclusively and without inhibition. With gullies running in front and behind wooden self-made shacks joined to each other with remarkable appreciation of available space, the poor continue to eke out an existence only made hazardous, in their view, once or twice a year when heavy rains and flooding pose serious threats.

While the state may not have the will, or it may argue, the resources, to monitor and relocate the adults who occupy gully and riverbank real estate, there must be a clear and unequivocal policy about the children living in those precarious situations. The four children who were washed away in the recent storm were not only victims of poverty, but victims of an indifferent and inefficient state apparatus. I firmly believe that children who live on gully and river banks must be seen as children in need of care and protection, and treated accordingly.

The state’s intervention is especially mandatory and undebatable, considering the fact that growing numbers of Jamaicans, including children, are becoming homeless as a result of garrison and gang politics. The most recent case of the Tredegar Park incident was nothing short of “ethnic cleansing”, resulting in the brutal massacre of several people, and the dislocation of families frightened by the terror that was unleashed. The reality is that every day more and more of our citizens are becoming nomadic refugees, adding to the expansion of squatter communities in the most precarious locations all across the country.

The day following the intense battering from Nicole, I received a frantic call from one of the inner-city communities in which I work to go and see the devastation they were experiencing. As I parked in the lane and began walking, my eyes kept resting on the familiar scenes of poverty all around – grinding poverty that our country has come to accept as a normal way of life. Multiple numbers of children living in one room, and every one of them, including the toddlers, labouring to mop up rain water, while others were busy carrying heavy buckets of supposedly good drinking water secured from the main community standpipe – the picture of outdoor kitchens with no roofs, and semi-completed homes, many without windows.

The calls had begun coming in from the first day of heavy rains, from friends begging for food and for tarpaulin for their roofs. As we walked with the children in tow, the destitution was palpable, and the sense of hope in small supply. We wended our way along the gully bank where the land slippages were stark. A few more inches of rain, and some of those houses would have become moving objects for the swelling gullies. “Look, Ms Blaine,” my guide pointed ahead of me. Suddenly there was no road – it was gone – broken up and washed down the gully. It looked and felt like the great divide – like what the divide between East and West Berlin must have felt like – people standing on each side, looking at one another, but not being able to cross over.

Tropical storm Nicole has once again highlighted the plight of the poor, and has once again made it clear that the country is in urgent need of a comprehensive “resettlement” programme. Accompanying that should be a plan to turn the huge network of gullies into roadways using “bridging”, thereby bringing to an end the “gully phenomenon”.

With love,

bab2609@yahoo.com