Florette McKenzie looks at her flood-wrecked house in Nightingale Grove, St. Catherine, last month following the passage of Tropical Storm Wilma.
Leonardo Blair, Enterprise Reporter
What do you do when you find out that the house and land you paid millions to secure is smack in an environment danger zone? When you can barely count your losses and run because you cannot afford to move? Follow Enterprise Reporter Leonardo Blair in this latest series, Wasteland, as he takes you into the belly of real estate grief and loss suffered by scores of Jamaicans. Find out why prospective homebuyers need to think about more than just liking a look, signing a contract and dutifully paying a mortgage.
ROOF-HIGH, mud-brown watermarks line the walls of her house. Buckets of muddied clothes litter what's left of her lawn. She's been washing for days, trying to get the mud out, trying to get her life back from the rubble left by Hurricane Wilma.
Her weather-beaten property looks like a shipwreck.
"It's hard to put back my life together each time," says Florette.
Florette has survived more than twenty floods since she has lived in Nightingale Grove. She remembers the dates like the birthdays of her children.
GIDDY
It was the summer of 1982. Florette McKenzie, 36, was giddy with excitement. She was finally moving into the house she had bought.
Nightingale Grove was an attractive housing scheme in suburban St. Catherine. The land was rich and fertile. A small stream gurgled behind it. The waters kissed the banks of her backyard like the sun kissing skin on a lazy afternoon. It was bliss and Florette was happy.
Happy, because that same year, then Minister of Construction, Bruce Golding, had pointed out in the National Housing Policy document that: "Inadequate housing is one of the most critical problems facing Jamaica. Next to unemployment, it is in fact our most urgent social problem."
Florette had beaten that problem. She had her house and did what most first-time homeowners often do. She planted a garden, bought furniture and revelled in her new-found rest.
"I felt proud," says Florette. "My aim was to get one (a house) before age 40 because I thought it would give me some time to establish myself."
Six months later, it rained hard in Nightingale Grove. So hard that the kissing stream hissed, raged and threatened to overflow its banks. But it never did, the rains never lasted long enough.
PEACE OF MIND SHATTERED
Still, Florette's peace of mind had been shaken by a fearful thought. It was an older neighbour who first gave her the unsettling news: Nightingale Grove was prone to bad flooding. Didn't she know?
The gentle stream behind her house was not always gentle when it rained. In fact, sometimes it would swell like a stuffed boa constrictor, even if it was not raining in Nightingale Grove.
There were tributaries from the St. Catherine hills. Sometimes, the river would slither unto the land and slap the walls of houses in its way.
Sometimes, the water would even slip inside houses and wreak havoc, before sneaking back into the riverbed with the stealth of the perfect thief.
"She (neighbour) told me that the floods would come but not very high. She told me all I would have to do is to hoist my furniture and I would be all right," explains Florette.
So she braced herself. She hoped a flood like that would never come. She hoped she would not have to hoist her brand new furniture. She even liked the gentle stream.
But hope was dented four years later.
In 1986, Florette's fears fulminated with the flood rains that year. The troubled stream morphed into the slithering boa, crunched its banks and swamped the land. Eighteen inches of water crashed into her house and she and her family hoisted furniture unto beams.
The backyard stream permanently graduated to a river after that.
The following year, Florette was hoisting again. And every year after that, the river would break into her house like a thief, and rob her of something precious.
"Don't care how careful you are, you always lose something," she says. Like battered women, Florence and her family stayed in the Nightingale house - trapped as if in a recurrent nightmare, still paying a mortgage and unable to sell or insure her valued house, the house that cost her thousands from back-breaking work at the hospital where she worked as a nurse.
LEARNED TO ADJUST
In time, though, Florette and her family learned to adjust. She couldn't just abandon her house like a few of her neighbours did. She couldn't afford to.
So "whenever the river looks like it's going to flood, I pack my things and go up to a church sister's house higher up in the scheme," she says.
But this year, 2005, multiple floods broke her dam of resilience. And it was Hurricane Wilma in October that gave her the knockout blow. Now she wants to get out of the ring. She is ready to leave Nightingale Grove.
It seems she was packing and hoisting nearly all the time. And even that didn't save her and many of her neighbours during Hurricane Wilma.
Nearly a third of the 270 lots in the Nightingale Housing Scheme were badly flooded.
Even two weeks later, after the sun came out, the streets remained caked with mud and many residents were desperately trying to sun-dry flood-soaked furniture.
The air in the scheme hugged the skin with a sticky, swampy touch. Flood victims were flocking a home-made office to sign up for public assistance. If they were living in a bowl-like location, it perhaps would have been a mini New Orleans after 'Katrina'.
Some residents, young and old, had to seek refuge on their rooftops during the storm. One of Florette's neighbours chuckled when she told how she scaled her walls and sought refuge on her roof from rising 'Wilma' waters.
The Jamaica Defence Force chopper ran out of fuel when it was supposed to rescue her. It was her son who helped her swim to safety. She loves her house, but the flood was bad this time.
LOOKING FOR ANSWERS
Now, after years of flood battering, Nightingale Grove is looking for answers. Are they going to be forgotten again after so many floods? What if a bigger hurricane hits next time? Who will compensate them for their loss?
"I wasn't made aware by the developers of the scheme that we could be flooded like this," says Florette. "It took me days to wash my clothes. I couldn't throw them all away because I can't buy back everything. I am getting tired now. It's not easy to buy a house and it's not easy to move," she explains looking at her flood-wrecked castle.
Inside, Wilma waters had ripped off her doors, scores of books were soaked, and her furniture and appliances were rendered useless. The hoisting never mattered this time. The river had digested $100,000 worth of Florette's house and dream. She looks at her house and sighs. "I am not a squatter," she says.
All she wanted was a house, one that she could pay for.
