In the 18 weeks I’ve been doing this series, nothing broke my spirit more than seeing a child celebrate the promise of breakfast on a day he thought he would go hungry.
“Go and get bread, cheese and something for you all to drink in the parlour,” Melinda Mohammed told her 12-year-old daughter.
One room away, sitting on the mattress he shares with his two sisters, the six-year-old child threw his hands in the air and exclaimed: “Yay! I get to eat.”
Mohammed said a donation from a sympathetic person provided enough money to buy items for a meal.
The kitchen at the family’s humble Pascal Road, Piparo home is bare, save for an almost empty bag of brown sugar and a handful of split peas.
Mohammed’s other daughter, an 18-year-old, howled from another room. Mohammed explained that she had autism and was shouting because she was hungry.
When the middle child returned from the parlour with what is locally called butter bread, a small block of cheese and a pineapple-flavoured soft drink, Mohammed hurriedly prepared the sandwiches.
Looking on in anticipation, the six-year-old boy began bouncing a tennis ball on the bare wooden floor.
Holding the plate with the sandwich in his hands, and with a beaming smile he said, “Everybody hungry!”
The daughter with autism took the sandwich in her hands and sat on the floor with her back against a wall to eat, while the girl who went for the food said she would eat later, possibly after we left.
With the children fed, Mohammed sat in the gallery of the house and lamented that life was not always like this.
“I used to plant things around the place like dasheen bush, fig, plantain, I even used to mind layers chicken too and sell the eggs. I never depended on anybody for anything,” she said.
However, following two days of heavy rainfall in 2022, their home in Rio Claro was destroyed in a landslip.
“Everything I lost—house, crops, animals, everything we lost. My children’s things, our furniture all gone. Right now, my children sleeping on the ground and I am sleeping on a thin mattress.
“The stove could blow up on us anytime,” she said pointing inside of the house where the children sat on a mattress.
Mohammed pays $1,500 a month to rent the second level of the house the family currently occupies. While grateful for a kind landlord, Mohammed, who does odd jobs for a living, said after paying rent there is little left for food.
“It does be really hard for me. When I pay my rent I don’t have money, I don’t have. Sometimes I catch myself asking people, just to have it for my children. I does ask, ‘Spare me a $10 or a $5 for my children please?’” she said, fighting back tears.
Leaning forward she said quietly: “It has plenty times they will say, ‘I hungry Mammy, what are you going to cook?’ and I does tell them I will go by one of the neighbours who assists me sometimes, but how often you can ask somebody? They will get fed up with you.”
She said she struggles to care for her daughter with autism.
“Boy, I does feel to give up you know. One day I didn’t have money to carry her to the clinic and I only had $20, I stopped a neighbour and asked for help, but I didn’t get through and boy I feel like the whole world was on me and I couldn’t move,” she said.
But Mohammed said she is not a lazy person who expects to live on handouts.
“I does leave here two times for the week to make a hustle, and sometimes I make about $150 or $200 just to keep my family going,” she said.
She said she often feels like a failure and cries herself to sleep at night.
But defiantly, the 40-year-old said she will continue to do those odd jobs because she will not give up on her responsibility to provide for her children.
She said she encourages her children to focus on their education, particularly her 12-year-old daughter, who proclaimed that she now wants to become a journalist.
“I tell her, I trying to give you an education and education is the way out. Only you can take it and make yourself better, that is all I can give you,” she said.
Mohammed said her husband tries to provide when he can but he, too, works odd jobs. He gets work in Rio Claro and mostly stays in that area.
“I not looking for too many handouts; all I am looking for is if someone can help me with a little house. And I could do the rest,” she said.
The children also need clothing and food.
Melinda Mohammed can be reached at 308-5911.
