IT took Denisher Forbes 10 years to save the deposit needed to buy a house in Meadows of Irwin, St James.

It took her another 10 to expand it and create her dream home. About four months after she finally managed to move upstairs, Hurricane Melissa came and robbed her of that delight.

“I didn’t even get to enjoy it. I’m not even completely finished. I live on the outskirts of the inside,” Forbes told the Jamaica Observer last Friday morning.

But all that pales when Forbes thinks about how close she came to dying.

The house has huge floor to ceiling glass windows and doors that threatened to shatter under Hurricane Melissa’s rage.

“Melissa unscrewed the plyboards,” Forbes said.

The insistent storm meticulously exposed the glass covering her staircase and the patio doors.

She is just grateful to be alive, and sings the praises of neighbours who let her benefit from their solar power and Starlink. She is also thankful to Theron Codner who has been helping with a lot of the heavy lifting that comes with life after Hurricane Melissa.

Forbes recognises that many people have it a lot worse than she does. That includes her daughter’s friend who had to swim to safety after her house in a nearby community was almost flooded. The teenager is now staying with them.

“I won’t complain because I’ve seen people’s houses that are crushed and I’ve seen people that have nothing at all, and I have,” Forbes said.

And as she picks up the pieces of her life, she has plans to do more to help others through her company Eloan Microfinance Ltd.

“I know I’m gonna be able to help some persons. I know that we will be giving out a lot of loans to help some persons, we’ll be reducing interest [rates]. I also know that I will be providing some form of frozen loans like we normally do to help persons that will not be able to make their payments. I have not had a meeting with my board yet, but we will be figuring out what to do,” said the woman who built her company from scratch after a very tough life.

It may take Forbes just a few days to get back to work. She’s still trying to get the glass shards out of her car’s air-conditioning vent. The windscreen was broken in two places by one of the many glass panels that once framed her patio. And Forbes, like many others who met Hurricane Melissa, is traumatised.

“I’m just happy to be alive. I thought I would be worried about what I lost but on a scale of one to 10, I do not think I feel what I’ve lost like [how I feel] the trauma. I have to just reserve telling you guys how I cried and braced that door. How when I look and see that it was about to burst, I don’t know how I put ply[wood] there… I didn’t even know how to use a screwdriver and all of that stuff. I really tried. This was my biggest fear. This glass door caving in on me.

“Right now when I go to my back neighbours’ [house] there is glass standing vertically in the soil around the back. So all the glass up there shattered. But I’m not even looking at that loss. When I assess my trauma I believe I am 100 over 10 traumatised. I have not begun to tell you how scared I was,” said Forbes.