“I just want to come out of here. Sometimes when I wake up, I does just want to run from this place,” Elecia Balcon-Corbin said, holding her one-month-old baby girl in her arms.
A few feet away sat her two-year-old on the floor. Flies were around him, rat droppings were scattered everywhere, a pungent scent of urine was about the place and a look of defeat was etched on the young mother’s face.
Their Brasso, Tabaquite home is essentially one room with an adjoining shipping container which serves as a bedroom. A stained wooden partition reveals months of water damage from a leaking roof. It’s easy to understand why the 29-year-old wants to escape. But a child-like drawing of a mother and four children on the wall explains why she cannot.
“It really hard to live here, the struggle is really hard,” Balcon-Corbin said, as she sat on a garbage bag filled with clothes because there are no chairs in the home.
“We don’t have running water or an indoor bathroom, so there’s no privacy to use the toilet.”
Balcon-Corbin showed Guardian Media barrels outside where they collect water from a neighbour’s hose. Organisms could be seen visibly swimming in the open barrel.
But it’s the rat infestation that poses the biggest risk.
“I feel they’re coming from the container; I feel they’re living there,” she said, almost in a whisper.
“Every night I hear them in my wares and if you go, you’ll see little faeces in the wares.”
Guardian Media took a look and confirmed this.
“Recently, I put a chicken to bake in the oven, then I start to hear pax, pax, pax! And if you see smoke, so it’s likely they living in the stove too.”
Inside, she said, the refrigerator barely works. It’s powered via an extension cord courtesy of the same neighbour.
“When my dad gets money from the Government, he is a cancer patient, so I get a little change from them, the most I will get is probably $500.”
When Guardian Media asked how she feeds four children and herself with that amount, she replied with a wry smile, “I work magic with it, it’s very hard and only lasts a week.”
The family depends on other relatives to provide them with additional support. Next to her on a table, the only piece of furniture in the home, was a small bag of flour and another bag of rice.
On this day, two of the elder children were at school. Balcon-Corbin said some days they can’t go.
“Most of the time I don’t have soap powder to wash their clothes or they might not even have anything to eat.”
She mentioned that her five-year-old is lucky to have started this academic year.
“A family member was supposed to buy all his books. He didn’t have a bag or lunch bag and the school’s principal bought it and said to send him.”
Balcon-Corbin said life wasn’t always this tough but she lost her job at the beginning of the pandemic. Then the father of the children, a Guyanese national, was recently deported.
“I don’t even have a phone so if he did try to get in contact with me, he can’t.”
She told Guardian Media that ironically, she’d often watch stories like hers in the past and promised she would not fall into the same lifestyle.
“Watching TV long time, you’d see parents going through this same thing and you’ll ask, ‘why she making so many children for?’ But...,” she said stopping to cry.
“One of my biggest regrets is not putting things in place first before I had them, but when you’re young you don’t think about tomorrow.”
But now, those children are her inspirations to do better.
“I does have to do without a lot so they will have, but I have to see about them, because I don’t want them to suffer like I suffering,” she said with the tears running freely now.
“I just hope they make better decisions than me, but we will make it, we will make it somehow.”
Balcon-Corbin is asking for assistance. She has three boys, aged nine, five, two and a one-month-old baby girl. Anyone who’d like to assist can contact her relative Shawn at 318-4510.
