Living in limbo!

PETERSFIELD, Westmoreland — One year after Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Westmoreland, leaving dozens of families homeless, several displaced residents remain stuck in an emergency shelter with growing frustration over delayed relief. Among them are more than a dozen people — mostly families — currently housed in the teacher’s cottage at Petersfield High School. They were relocated to the structure after initially being sheltered in the main school building. According to Velecia Ewen, a displaced resident from Pullet Lane, those staying at the shelter are desperate to move forward. “All we want is just the key [to the promised container house]. We don’t want anything more than to go back to our life,” Ewen told the Jamaica Observer on Wednesday while describing her ordeal of living in a shelter a year after the disaster.

According to Ewen, residents were moved from the school’s main building with the impression that the relocation to the teacher’s cottage would be brief. “They move us and put us over here for six weeks, and six weeks becomes many months now,” said Ewen as she claimed they were told in May that the stay would last only two to four weeks. Shelteree Velecia Ewen shows the two mattresses on the floor that her family of five sleeps on in the Petersfield High School teachers’ cottage. (Photo: Anthony Lewis) She expressed deep frustration over a lack of communication regarding the container homes being erected near the Shrewsbury Housing Scheme. “We have no idea when it will finish. Nobody nah come say nothing to we. Nobody nah talk to we,” stated Ewen. Another shelteree, who did not give her name, added, “We don’t know anything more than to sit down and get up every day and go and look. ” Ewen, who has visited the site, argued that progress on the…