How will Jamaica recover from its most powerful hurricane on record? Natricia Duncan reports
When Hurricane Melissa reached Jamaica on Tuesday, it was the most powerful weather system to hit the island since records began.
Ava Brown, in St Catherine parish, says her neighbourhood has been turned upside down. “Most of my neighbours’ roofs are gone. Crops and animals have drowned. Roads are impassable. People have died. I heard an unconfirmed report that one of the hospitals is almost unusable. It’s a disaster.”
Darin, in St Catherine’s Treasure Beach, says the community is coming together to deal with the destruction. “In the house I lived in, I lost the ceiling and the roof, so it’s not livable. People are walking the streets right now, looking around to see how they can help each other. There is a lot of devastation.”
For the Guardian’s Caribbean correspondent, Natricia Duncan, enduring the hurricane meant balancing her work as a reporter and her role as a mother looking after her daughter.
