Former homeless man sheltered families during hurricane

When Hurricane Melissa pounded western Jamaica, Othniel Barrett's house in Bethel, Westmoreland, shook under the pressure of the wind and rain - windows shattering and the roof leaking.

And yet that same battered home became a refuge for 12 families seeking safety during the storm.

"All my food I had to give to them," Barrett said. "Even though my house was leaking and the windows blew in, everyone in the lane came to me. It was just bad there's no other word for it." As the hurricane ripped through the community, Barrett gathered the families into the two safest rooms downstairs. When the windows shattered and the wind forced opened the doors, he took cover in his bathtub and prayed.

"I just kept hoping it would be over," he said.

For Barrett to provide shelter for others was a full-circle moment of sorts for him. The 48-year-old, who was born in Westmoreland, carries the memory of starting life with nothing. As a boy after he moved to Kingston, he slept under a tent at Sts Peter and Paul Catholic Church, walking to school in borrowed shoes, until a scholarship carried him to New York.

"That tent was my first shelter," he told THE STAR. "Now, I try to be that shelter for other people."

Hurricane Melissa

"Children should not feel hungry. They should not feel neglected or unwanted," he said. "I grew up poor and homeless. That's why I understand their pain." Those years on the street taught Barrett how thin the line is between safety and loss - a lesson that returned to him during the passage of Hurricane Melissa. He had been in Bethel for several weeks helping relatives rebuild when the storm struck. The following night, with trees and light poles blocking the main roads, he began the long journey back to Kingston at 2 a.m. The roads were still littered with fallen trees and light poles, forcing him to take back routes through the hills.

"The roads were bad before the hurricane, and now they're worse," he said. "People had to carve new paths through the debris." By sunrise, he reached the country's capital, exhausted and heartsick. Behind him lay a community he described as "gone". Roofs flattened, walls torn away, livestock vanished.

"You'd look through a window and see a man with 200 layers of boards, and when you look again, it's gone. The whole place just changed."

What troubled Barrett most afterwards was the gap between what he saw and what he later heard on the news.

"They said there were over 200 shelters," he said. "But what's their definition of a shelter? A shelter should be strong enough to stand in a hurricane not one that gets blown away." Even before the storm, Bethel had gone two years without running water.

"People were already suffering," Barrett said. "Then Melissa came and finished what was left."

Now, as he prepares to fly back to New York, he is being overcome with grief.

"A woman gave me two slices of bread and sardine before I left," he said, his eyes filling with tears. "They have nothing and I'm leaving them." Barrett said that he plans to return with generators and Starlink units to help restore communication.

"When I came into Kingston and saw trees again, it felt like another world," he said. "But I see resilience in the people. They just need help real help."