One of the six Trinidad and To­ba­go na­tion­als who were on board the Caribbean Princess and al­lowed to re­turn home on Sat­ur­day says she cried when she was wel­comed back af­ter be­ing strand­ed at sea for months.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, an ob­vi­ous­ly over­joyed Es­ther Dy­er, a fe­male vo­cal­ist with the band Xcite, was full of praise for every­one who ad­vo­cat­ed to get her and the oth­er five lo­cals back home.

For months, Dy­er, Rod­ney Har­ris, Shel­don George, Ron­dell Andy Ed­wards and Vi­vian Williams were stuck on the ship, which was docked off the coast of Bar­ba­dos.

The six na­tion­als were tak­en to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ (UWI) Debe cam­pus for their 14-day quar­an­tine on Sat­ur­day night, im­me­di­ate­ly af­ter com­ing ashore.

Asked if she be­lieved more should have been done soon­er to bring them home, Dy­er said, “I can’t say, I’m not in the po­si­tion and maybe it’s not easy to make these de­ci­sions be­cause it was not easy for my com­pa­ny to take a de­ci­sion to cease op­er­a­tions and deal­ing with a mas­sive scale repa­tri­a­tion ef­fort with over 20,000 strand­ed crew.

“I know that at times we felt hope­less, I just know that we need­ed to come home and be with the peo­ple that we loved.”

She said while the group makes their liv­ing at sea, be­ing stuck on the ship with no idea of when they would be able to come home while the world braced it­self for the wrath of the COVID-19 virus, left them scared and in de­spair.

“The dif­fer­ence was we were no longer work­ing and fac­ing the im­pact of the pos­si­bil­i­ty of not be­ing able to go back home, the crash of our in­dus­try and the source of our in­come,” Dy­er said.

Re­count­ing the fi­nal leg of their jour­ney back to the is­land, Dy­er said she told her­self not to cry when she saw the first hint of lights from Trinidad at sea.

“I start­ed to tear up and tell my­self, don’t cry, don’t be a punk. And when we board­ed the ves­sel and the guy said ‘Wel­come home, we are so hap­py to have you guys,’” I just bust down cry­ing,” she said.

But with her prayers an­swered, Dy­er said her heart was heavy for oth­er crew mem­bers who were not be­ing al­lowed in­to their home coun­tries.

“I had all these mixed emo­tions. I didn’t know if I want­ed to come home any­more, I was sad that I was get­ting to go home, some of my friends not get­ting to go home, they are still stuck out there and I keep hum­ming that song from Machel and David Rud­der, ‘This is the land of oil and mu­sic’ (Oil & Mu­sic) one of my favourite songs and you know, this is home, and will al­ways be home, no mat­ter what hap­pens.”

With 13 days left of her quar­an­tine as of this morn­ing (Mon­day), Dy­er was all smiles as she talked about her post-quar­an­tine plans.

“What I re­al­ly need to do is find a re­al­ly nice roti and a nice big bag of man­goes, dif­fer­ent ones, and spend as much time with fam­i­ly as pos­si­ble. They were send­ing me videos and pic­tures and that just kept me go­ing, see­ing my nieces and nephews laugh and play and be to­tal­ly clue­less about all of this dis­as­ter go­ing on around them, I just need to in­dulge in every­thing that means the most to me which is fam­i­ly,” she said.