“Before Hurricane Melissa I could have navigated life, figured things out. But since its passage, everything has just been turned upside down,” said Kerry-Ann Vickers.
Vickers was three months pregnant when Hurricane Melissa demolished parts of her home in the coastal town of Black River, in St Elizabeth, west Jamaica, last October. Nearly six months on, Vickers, 25, is still struggling to get support to rebuild her house and is distraught that her baby will arrive in a home without a secure roof.
The single parent, who also has a six-year-old son, said she was “permanently traumatised” when the record-breaking storm rained unprecedented destruction on Jamaica, forcing her and her family to flee for shelter. Today she worries that life will never return to normal.
“There are days where I just sit and stare out into the abyss because I don’t know what to do, how I’m going to move forward … everywhere I look, it’s just depression,” she said.
In Success, a former British plantation in the north-western parish of Hanover, Kshema Gray, who had to flee her home and then the shelter where she had sought refuge with her four children, said last month that, although there had been help with food, including through the World Central Kitchen, she was still waiting for support to rebuild.
Fighting back tears, she recounted the experience of wind blasting through her windows, sending glass flying across the room, ripping off her roof and lifting heavy furniture off the floor. “It’s not easy at all. I haven’t gotten any support,” she said, adding that although the government had carried out assessments of the damage, she was still waiting to find out if she would get any help.
Initial assessments after Melissa showed that more than 150,000 homes were damaged or destroyed. Today, although there is no official confirmation of the number of people still left without secure shelter and supplies, Andrea Purkiss, a Hanover MP, said many in her constituency were in dire need and awaiting payments to rebuild their homes.
“Payments are taking a while to get to residents,” Purkiss said. “So there is still that long wait for beneficiaries to get that payout that was promised. I also don’t believe everybody got assessed. So I believe there should be another assessment period because I have persons showing up at my constituency office almost daily making inquiries about getting assessed.
“Lots of people still don’t have roofs,” she added. “This morning, a lady called me asking for two tarps because she still has not received the payout and as soon as it rains her house gets wet … and that is common throughout the constituency.”
The Jamaican government said it was accelerating recovery efforts under the Restoration of Owner-Occupants Family Shelters (Roofs) programme.
Pearnel Charles, the minister of labour and social security, said: “We are committed to strengthening our systems and operations to meet the growing demand and we will continue working to ensure that as many families as possible receive the support they need to rebuild.”
To date, $8.25bn (£6.18bn) has been disbursed, representing a major scale-up of support to affected households across the country. The latest phase includes an additional $3bn in allocations and will result in 14,000 new beneficiaries.
In response to recent public concern and media reports, the ministry stressed that funds under the programme were not exhausted. “Rather, disbursements are accelerating as this expanded phase is rolled out nationwide,” it said.
But Matthew Samuda, the environment minister, said last month the country had been put in an unfair position of having to bear the brunt of climate breakdown, which experts say is behind the more frequent and intense hurricanes, such as Melissa.
The storm, he said, had put at risk years of fiscal discipline and stability. He added that global climate change financing mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund for mitigation and adaptation, and the Loss and Damage Fund, which supports developing countries to recover from disasters induced by the climate crisis, were not fit for purpose.
“If I give you some context, we have $10bn worth of losses and damage [from Melissa],” he said. “The Green Climate Fund for its lifetime has thus far dispatched around $19bn globally. The Loss and Damage Fund is a new funding mechanism, and the maximum that it can give to any one country under its construct is $20m. So it gives you an idea of the sort of gap.”
Last year, in an open letter to Cop30 in Brazil, hundreds of human rights groups and environmentalists argued that there was a link between colonialism and enslavement and the climate crisis. Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, first made the case at the Cop27 climate talks in 2022.
Mariama Williams, a Jamaican economist and senior adviser at the Global Afro-Descendant Climate Justice Collaborative, which signed the open letter, said: “The idea was to push climate negotiations to acknowledge the structural and historical causes of vulnerability, to strengthen the reparatory justice within climate governance and to position Afro-descendant communities … not just simply as people impacted, but as rights-holders and solution-providers in the climate and environmental crises, who have a significant stake in the negotiations.”
Last year there were calls for big emitters and former colonial powers, such as the UK, which pledged £7.5m in emergency funds to Jamaica and other islands affected by the hurricane, to do more. But there has been praise for the support from Jamaican diaspora communities in Britain, which Alexander Williams, Jamaica’s high commissioner to the UK, described as a “lifeline” during a virtual town hall meeting before Christmas.
Ava Brown, a British-Jamaican author, publisher and film-maker, who was in St Elizabeth when the hurricane hit, is back in the UK raising money for victims. “There is something profoundly painful about leaving a place you love in its moment of vulnerability. But I understood my path was to serve through my Black River Festival Foundation,” she said.
Claudene Daley, the vice-principal of Black River high school, said the foundation’s contributions were helping some students afford transportation to and from school.
In London, Nathaniel Peat, the entrepreneur who chairs the diaspora organisation Jamaicans Inspired and is a former Global Jamaica Diaspora Council (GJDC) representative, has been on the frontline of a nationwide, community-led effort to help Jamaica rebuild. Celebrities from the diaspora – such as the musicians Maxi Priest and Luciano and the comedian White Yardie – worked alongside businesses, churches, community associations, social clubs and individuals to support those affected.
Peat said: “As we got wind of the hurricane approaching Jamaica it was flying around lots of WhatsApp groups … how could we mobilise, thinking about economic and financial support, social impact, relief efforts?”
In January, 2.9 tonnes of aid left the UK for Jamaica, transported by British Airways for free, thanks to individuals including Jackson Smith, the founder of Fantasy Wings, the programme driving diversity in the British aviation industry.
It has been vital that the aid is of the right kind. Cyeth Denton-Watts, Jamaica’s deputy high commissioner to the UK, said: “We are aware that there has been an overwhelming amount of clothing that has been donated – but in essence what we’re trying to do is to obtain things like tarpaulins, generators, lanterns, flashlights, solar lighting, tools that we need: hammers, saws, nails, chainsaws, screws.”
The diaspora is supporting British tradespeople, including builders and plumbers, to travel to Jamaica to rebuild Westmoreland and St Elizabeth in the coming months. Meanwhile, GJDC has launched a national survey to document the contributions of British Jamaicans. Prof Patrick Vernon, a GJDC representative, said the initiative would help to ensure the diaspora’s contribution was “aligned with Jamaica’s future development priorities”.
On the ground in Jamaica, people such as Audley Feare, the principal of Aberdeen high school in St Elizabeth, who are witnessing the continuing need among those affected, are hoping the world remembers Jamaica and continues to send support as the global news spotlight fades from the still-recovering country.
Meanwhile, in Santa Cruz, St Elizabeth, Karene Salmon said she had no idea when she would be able to return to her severely damaged home, 15 miles away in Black River. “It’s really rough and we are still in need of help.”
