LIFE for 41-year-old mother of seven, Paula Ashman, has always been filled with pain and sorrow, leaving her crying at bedtime most nights as she wondered where her next meal would be coming from.

However, life changed last Friday for the unemployed Mandeville resident when, with just a spin, she won $5.2 million in the ‘Grace million dollar game’.

Ashman, an ardent collector of Grace labels, said she had mailed six entries to the company’s million-dollar game in July, hoping to win between $100,000 and $1 million. Having entered the competition three times before in April, it was a possibility that her name would not be called, but even so, Ashman said she watched the cash prize draws on television in the mornings to see if she would be lucky.

On the morning her entry was finally pulled from the drum, Ashman said she was inspecting her son’s old school shoes, contemplating where the money would come from to buy him another one for the new school year.

“While I was there looking in it, I heard (programme host) Neville (Bell) say, ‘We are going to call the three names for the million-dollar draw’, and I heard him say, ‘I am going to stretch my hand way over the back here to take up this entry’. I saw him pull out the envelope and I heard him say ‘Paula Ashman’, and I just couldn’t believe it,” Ashman said. She said that she was ecstatic.

“Mi affi just a hold my heart, and I jump up and down and I hug my son and I call my neighbour and say, ‘my name call, my name call, my name call for the million-dollar draw’.”

The rest is history. She went on to pocket $5.2 million in the game show, and finally to find relief after several misfortunes.

She reminisced about Christmas Eve, 2007, while many families celebrated the dawn of a New Year, when she stood and watched helplessly as the four-bedroom house she occupied with four of her children was burnt to the ground. Nothing was saved, but they were fortunate to escape unhurt.

Ashman told the Observer that a month before the fire, while in hospital where she was receiving treatment for pneumonia, she received a call from her brother, informing her that her father with whom she was extremely close had died. She said that she immediately summoned her common-law husband – father of her two youngest children – to the hospital where they spent a long time talking, after which he left shortly after 7:00 pm to head home.

She said shortly after the man left she received a phone call with more bad news.

“Somebody call me and say, ‘A who them shoot up a Mandeville?’, and mi say ‘you know mi no know cause I am in the hospital’, and the person said, ‘Okay, Okay, mi can’t tell you then’,” she said.

A second phone call, confirmed her worst fear: her common-law husband, Tyrone Morris and one of his friends were murdered. Morris was shot five times, twice in the head.

The news could not have come at a worse time, as Ashman was eight months pregnant with the couple’s third child. Losing her father and the father of her children the same day proved too much for her, and she was sedated by the nurses at the hospital.

Ashman’s baby was born just eight days before Morris was buried. With nowhere else to go, she rented a two-bedroom house for herself and her children. But with no job, Ashman was unable to pay the $12,000 for rent and decided to sublet the two bedrooms to other persons and transform the living room of the house into her quarters.

“You know how much time mi cry, and still mi no like mek them (children) see when mi cry cause mi just wish say mi coulda do better, mi wish to God, I could do better for them,” said Ashman, as tears started gathering. “A nuff cry mi cry you know, nuff cry mi cry.

“All mi son that go to high school, him attendance bad so till. When I give him $400 a day mi fret so till, and yet still he is a child like this, that if mi give him the money, if is even $30 him going to bring home,” she said. The boy, she said, pays $220 for transportation.

“Let me tell you something, jobs in Jamaica are not easy to get; mi used to do domestic work, see all mi fingers dem here. blisters tek up mi finger,” she said, as she showed damage to her hands from years of laundering for others.

“Nothing was going on, so mi used to touch the road and gamble Cash Pot nuff, because if you even bet $30 or $50 and win you can get a meal so you can go buy and cook for the kids.” She said at times she even had to beg.

“I just break them pickney here fi know say a what mi have mi a give you, nobody tell me what you want,” she said, while pointing to her three-year-old son and her five-year-old daughter. “Because I can remember days when it was porridge. Porridge a morning, porridge a lunch, porridge a dinner, nothing fi drink. We drink the porridge without milk, just sugar and salt. And sometimes you cook and you have little gravy left over and me just put it in the fridge and cook two little dumpling put with it the next day,” she said.

Life was extremely unbearable, but her frequent visits to church were enough to convince her that there is a God. In the nights, she would go to the crusades being hosted by the Faith Claim Ministries, a church located in walking distance from her. Just a few weeks after sending in her Grace labels, Ashman and her children decided to go to church and while sitting in the back row, she was called up by the pastor of the church.

“The pastor said, ‘That lady, sitting down there in the green top, come here, I need to talk with you,” she recalled. After realising that she was the person he was calling, she went up to him.

“He said ‘Give me your right hand, honey, God said to tell you enough is enough, he has seen your tears, God is about to bless you, there is a miracle coming your way, where you are not going to believe it, t ake it this day or leave it’ and I started to cry.”

Ashman was convinced God was going to bless her with another house and started looking towards her blessing, but as the days passed, she became less hopeful. Things came to a boiling point on Independence Day, when she woke up and there was nothing in the house to feed her children. In a fit of rage she grabbed her rake, went out into her yard and started crying out to God aloud and begging for some sort of deliverance. It was the following day that she heard her name announced as the person who was chosen to enter the Grace competition.

“Big up to Grace, this is just a blessing in disguise, Grace is doing something for poor people,” she was keen to point out.

Finally, the mother is going to be able to provide a better life for herself and her children. She said she intends to use the money to build a house on a piece of land her mother had left her and then put the rest in a fixed deposit for her children’s future. She said she also intends to buy a computer for her son to help him with his school work and donate some money to the church for their community projects.