Plantain allyuh! Yam! Come allyuh, green fig!” The loud shouts coming from the middle of the Chaguanas Market are from young Marsha Bhall as she busily sells vegetables and provisions to a steady stream of customers. One of the most successful vendors in the market, she sells out all her produce in two to three hours.
“I sell cheap and I am friendly,” she said. When she is finished, she drives to her simple, wooden home in Chase Village in her Mazda 323 which she bought for $10,000, cooks lunch and picks up her five-year-old daughter, Maykala, from school. Then, she goes to buy more produce from a farmer for the next day at the market.
Bhall, a 31-year old single parent, is contented, she said. But it wasn’t always so. Just a few years ago she was wandering the streets of Queen’s, New York, homeless and suicidal. Her’s is a story of an extraordinary will to survive, an undefeatable spirit and enduring faith in in the God she believes in.
She said she and four siblings grew up in a troubled home with their parents, but did not want to say more than that. When her parents separated and her mother left home with the children, it did not get better. By 17, Bhall, seeking escape and a better life, fled to the US.
She found work in America as an illegal immigrant but said employers would not pay her what she was due because she “had no papers.” She managed to save some money, though, which came in handy when the financial crisis hit the US in 2008 and thousands, including her, lost their jobs.
But her money lasted only one year.
“My savings ran out and I could not pay the rent or buy food. I ended up on the streets, living off $1 a day.
“I bought a small container of watermelon for $1 everyday for about four months. That was my meal for the day.
“I slept in parks and when winter came rode the subway A Train whole day and slept in it when it parked up at night.
“Not all the conductors would run me. One night, around 2 am, someone came trying to rape me or something. I ran out the train and never went back.”
Bhall said she began to have suicidal thoughts. I started to say better I kill myself.”
But she didn’t. She called her mother in Trinidad, with whom she had a strained relationship, and begged her to buy a ticket home for her.
“She refused at first but eventually did.”
Bhall returned home and began living in the abandoned old, wooden family home. And she started selling hot peppers on the streets of Chaguanas.
“I had Maykala by then and used to be holding my baby in one hand and a bag of peppers in the other.
“I had to be running and hiding from the police when they ran the vendors off the street.”
Bhall said she prayed and fasted and got a stall inside the market. “The Lord gave me Q 11 in the middle.”