Forced to live under the steps of an abandoned Housing Development Corporation (HDC) building with her six children and grand daughter, single mother Allison Dick is appealing to the authorities to help them with a home, especially in this Yuletide season.
“I want to make an appeal to whoever in authority, the Government, I am not blaming the Government for my situation, but what I’m saying is if they could just soften their hearts a little bit, if not just for the sake of the children,” Dick said between tears yesterday.
She has made several previous appeals to the authorities which have fallen on deaf ears.
Dick’s family was among 25 families thrown out of the HDC apartment buildings at Harmony Hall, Gasparillo, nine months ago. Soon after that eviction, she moved her belongings and her children under a tent on the compound.
Following the bad weather caused by Tropical Storm Bret in June, which almost blew down the tent, Dick and her children, aged 20, 18, 16, nine and two seven-year-old twins, and her four-year-old granddaughter, sought shelter in a very small, dark space under the step of one of the buildings. Her 20-year-old daughter is also nine months pregnant and was staying a relative in San Juan, but returned recently because her due date is approaching.
During the interview, a lit mosquito coil was her only means of keeping away the mosquitoes. Two mattresses, a stove and a gas tank and a fridge were under the step.
Hurt by the harsh and demeaning comments made about her on social media, Dick said this is not the life she wanted for her children or herself, but her poor health, which caused her to stop working, had forced her into this situation.
Dick suffers from sleep apnea (a disorder in which you have one or more pauses in breathing while you sleep), anaemia and hypertension, depression, a low blood count, and has to do three surgeries unrelated to those conditions.
“The thing is people not understanding. Okay, I did not ask myself to get sick, I mean sometimes things happen no one could predict life. For all my life I work and mind my children from day one. I saw on Facebook where they talk about I make children and I want my son to mind them, that is not the way,” Dick said.
“I maintained my children from day one, is only when I started to get sick and started to pass out in work and thing is when I realise I could not work any more. Sometimes when I lie down it grieves me because I cannot work to take my children out of this situation. No parent wants to see their child in this situation you know.”
Dick worked 12 years as a security officer, but was forced to stop five years ago because of her health complications. She now receives public assistance and financial help from her oldest son, who also works as a security officer
Explaining how she landed in this situation, Dick recalled that in July 2006, her home in Moruga, which she built, was destroyed by fire. Her three-year-old son Atiba died in that fire.
She then moved to St Joseph where she was renting. By that time, her relationship with Atiba’s father, who also fathered her four eldest children, ended. She met her twins’ father, but when they were one month old he too left her. She was on the verge of being evicted when in 2010 the HDC stepped in and assigned her an apartment at the Harmony Hall development where she is at presently. Two months after, however, she began experiencing infrastructural defects within unit. Dick, who was not working as she had just given birth and undergone surgery, asked HDC to relocate them. After four months she moved to another apartment with her children and granddaughter without being allocated the unit by the HDC. In March, she and several other families were thrown out by HDC for illegal occupation of the condemned units.
Yesterday, she admitted: “It is horrible here. I am fearful for our lives.”
Despite her situation she ensures her four of her children attends school. But her granddaughter is not attending a school.
Contacted on the issue, HDC managing director Brent Lyons confirmed they contacted Dick on her problem. He said they were encountering challenges in locating an appropriate, adequate and affordable unit for her, but are working feverishly to help her.