She was a 32-year-old mother of three when Hurricane Charlie devastated Jamaica in 1951. Seventy-two years later, the now 104-year-old Adlyn Bernard-Smith, who still remembers that disaster vividly, credits her faith in God, prayer, and good Jamaican yams for her longevity.

“It [Hurricane Charlie] was terrible, man, it was in the night. My husband and I woke up from our sleep and heard the noise outside, and I got up because the children were asleep in their room, so I went and called them, and all of us were in the same bed, and we began to sing some choruses,” a chirpy Bernard-Smith recalled.

They sang Safe Am I in the Storm the chatty centenarian said in recent interview with the Jamaica Observer.

“We were there singing and singing until God made the day light,” she reminisced.

Hurricane Charlie, or the “51 storm”, as it is called, left hundreds of Jamaicans homeless and more than 150 people dead, with several communities destroyed. It has been listed as one of the most devastating natural disasters to have hit the island.

The community of Maidstone, nestled in the Don Figueroa Mountains in Manchester where Bernard-Smith resided at the time, survived the storm but lost the sole primary school structure.

“The school [then Nazareth All Age School] was shattered to the ground. All of that was gone,” Bernard-Smith recalled. The school was, however, rebuilt and still serves the community.

The former seamstress, famed for her custom-designed garments, who now resides in the United States, is revered as a treasure trove of memories and history for her family and other community members in the diaspora.

“She still has her faculties intact, she has a great sense of humour, she joins in Bible study and prayer meetings with her family and others via Zoom and she does her ‘search for word’ puzzle every day and watches news reports,” one family friend, Grace Asphall, told the Observer.