FOR what feels like the umpteenth time, Maud Richards and her family — who are yet to recover from the damage done to their home by Hurricane Beryl — have battened down their roof and are hoping for the best as Hurricane Melissa nears Jamaica.

The multi-generational family lives at a section of the coast in Manchioneal, Portland. No stranger to heavy winds, rain, and flooding, together they’ve weathered storms from as far back as Hurricane Gilbert in 1988. With evidence of the last storm still visible, their roof barely hanging on, funds low, and their cries for help bearing no fruit, they have no choice but to do it all over again.

“I just nailed up my house and put on some zinc on my house back, nailed up my door and my windows, and put some blocks on my housetop so the zinc them don’t really lift off again. I prepare because all the while I always get it [the storms and hurricanes] and my house always mash up, so I prepare for it,” Richards told the Jamaica Observer in an interview last week as Melissa, then a tropical storm, meandered towards Jamaica.

The Sunday Observer first met the 69-year-old, her daughter, and grandchildren in June, just shy of the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Beryl skirting the island, leaving a trail of damage in its wake. At the time, she had shared her family’s struggles with rebuilding after each severe weather event. She said then that, unlike her neighbours who have fled the area over the years, her family has to stay put because they have no other choice and have received little help. Sentimental attachment to the home left to Richards by her parents also makes leaving the area difficult.

“I just do what I have to do. From Hurricane [Beryl] blow off my [roof], all now the mattress is still on top of the house down there,” she shared, noting that the mattress and other household items were water-damaged during the weather event.

While she has stayed at shelters in the past, said she and her family will be bunkering down at a nearby friend’s house, which is more stable and can withstand the harsh winds and rain expected during the passage of Hurricane Melissa.

However, her mind will be elsewhere, as she knows her home will be destroyed yet again. The thought of the damage that potentially awaited was enough to get her blood boiling, as an aggravated Richards was seemingly at a loss as to the way forward for herself and her family.

“I don’t have any alternative. I don’t have anywhere else to go or anything to fall back on. I am a 69-year-old woman, so what do they expect me to do?” she said in reference to government entities, adding that she had applied for assistance after Hurricane Beryl but is yet to receive any help.

“Like I told you the last time, it’s the same; so the place stay and the weather a guh come again and a same so [it a guh stay]. I can’t move,” the distraught elderly woman told the Sunday Observer.

Richards said her plight has been further exacerbated since she was unable to collect her pension earlier this month. A fisherwoman in her earlier years, she shared that she now relies on her pension, awarded through the Ministry of Labour and Social Security, to make ends meet.

However, with her pension book requiring renewal and her forgetting to get it done, Hurricane Melissa could not have come at a more inconvenient time.

“Right now, I’m under lone stress. Not even food I have,” she said.

“I would want [some] money to buy my rice and tin mackerel…” she added.

While her situation is dire, she remains in high spirits.

“A just God and time,” she said, adding that she and her family are taking the situation one step at a time.

“That [the house] a guh affi go through crisis again for people to see say we are asking for [help],” a defeated Richards said.

— Tamoy Ashman

In this Jamaica Observer file photo from June, waves crash against the shoreline in Manchioneal, Portland. (Photo: Garfield Robinson)