By Paul A. Reid, Staff ReporterWESTERN BUREAU:
IT WAS a day like any other for Mrs. Janet McMahon as she conversed with her second daughter, Nicky, soon to be 19, in her store wedged between two multi-story buildings just off the Lucea Square.
The dressmaker known to all simply as 'Ms Mack' seemed just a little surprised when a man she had never met before approached the store asking for her. Things were to take on a even stranger twist when the man told her he had a message for her from her husband, Lennox, who she had not seen in over five years and had not heard anything from him in over a year.
Several other families, wives, children, nieces and cousins all showed signs of relief and joy as they learned that the men who some feared had met the worst were in fact safe and could be returning soon.
Nicky Martin was relaxing on a bench under a shed built by her grandfather when she heard the news that her uncle, Gladstone, had been located. Jumping up off the bench she ran as fast as she could to the house on Old Road in Lucea, calling "Mama dem find Uncle Gladstone."
DEAD ENDS
Patricia Samuels-Watson responded as if a huge stone had been lifted from her shoulders when she was contacted by telephone, saying they had tried for years to contact her father Clarence 'Cutty' Samuels but kept coming up on dead ends. She said they had heard at one stage that he was dead but never stopped searching until they heard he was alive but not much else.
With her mouth agape and tears welling up in her expressive eyes, Mrs. McMahon told The Gleaner that the last thing she heard from her husband was that he and some of the other men had left the group they had gone with and were on their own.
She said she did not get much information on their whereabouts or how they were doing after a while and had "wondered all kinds of things, all the time".
She said that soon after they had left in 1998 she got a message from him asking for money to buy medicine as he is diabetic and she said she sent what she could at the time.
She said she got snippets of messages here and there over a period of time but even that dried up as well.
Samuels-Watson could barely contain her joy at the news that her father was alive and wanted to know how they were doing. She said that she and her two siblings, Ingrid who now lives in London and teenager Ryan, a student at a Montego Bay High School had been told by Dr. Juan Reid that their father was sending some money for them but that never came and they did not hear from Reid again for a long time.
PHOTOS
She said her father had never seen any of his grandchildren as he left when she was pregnant with her son and before her sister Ingrid had her twins. She said she sent photos of the family to him but she is not sure if he got them.
A telephone call way back in 1998, soon after they had arrived in Nicaragua and before things took a turn for the worst, was the last direct communication Samuels-Watson said they had with their father.
With their hopes re-ignited, Samuels-Watson, not one to waste time waiting, was already making plans of going to see her father and was already asking questions on how she might find her way to the remote fishing village he was living, on Pearl Lagoon; one hour by speed boat from Bluefields which is another one-hour flight or an eight-hour bus ride from the capital city of Managua.
