‘I cried the whole night’

Reaching Cobie Ridge – a quiet settlement about seven miles southeast of Black River and roughly five miles from Santa Cruz– on Wednesday was no easy feat.

Fallen trees, light poles, and broken branches turned the road into a maze of debris, and it took the clearing of a bridge and several blocked sections before The Gleaner team finally made it in. The area remains cut off from the rest of Jamaica, a pocket of silence in the wake of Hurricane Melissa.

Inside one of the stranded houses sat Ruth Lyn Deer, 76, whispering prayers over the sound of dripping rainwater.

“I had to spread plastic on the bed so it don’t get wet,” she told The Gleaner, glancing at the patch of sky where her roof used to be. “The roof gone.”

Deer, who suffers from arthritis and depends on a walking stick, could only watch as Hurricane Melissa ripped through her small Food for the Poor home. The entire roof above her bathroom was torn off, and a sinkhole opened in her bedroom floor.

“The breeze come from every direction,” she recalled. “Me think it did a go go weh wid the whole house.”

The community remains without electricity or running water, and no emergency teams have reached them yet.

“We haven’t heard from anyone,” Deer said. “We cut off from the rest a the world.”

Outside, fallen utility poles still lined the road, remnants of the chaos that left traffic frozen for hours until volunteers and members of the Jamaica Defence Force, Jamaica Constabulary Force, and parish responders managed to clear a single lane.

Inside, Deer had bottles filled with water for storage and her few remaining electronics wrapped in plastic.

“I cried the whole night,” she said. “My worst fear is that I can’t afford to build back the house. I have no retirement funds. I have nothing.”

Her two-bedroom board structure, built more than six years ago through Food for the Poor, had replaced an older brick house that collapsed years ago.

“Before this, it was a brick one, but it was dilapidated and completely damaged. I couldn’t afford to fix that,” she said.

For decades, she scrubbed Kingston’s office floors and wiped down desks before returning home to St Elizabeth to live out her quiet years. Having lost two pregnancies in her youth, she never became a mother, and now depends on the kindness of her friend Stacy, who visits when she can. When The Gleaner team arrived, Stacy was by her side, mopping away the murky rainwater that had pooled across the floor.

Even as the wind roared outside, Deer chose to stay.

“Sometimes it better to face it,” she said. “If mi leave and come back and everything gone, that would hurt mi more.”

Around her lay splintered boards and wet clothes, yet her faith stood firmer than any wall left standing. “I’ve been through so many hardships, but I still weather them,” she murmured. “The rain mash up mi roof, but not mi spirit.”

ashanti.lawson@gleanerjm.com