Reporter
carisa.lee@cnc3.co.tt
On February 26, Cheryl Ann Felix and her younger sister lost everything they had worked years to build in a matter of minutes.
“When I reach in the back here, is nothing, you can’t see anything; the whole top done burn,” Felix cried as she remembered that day.
A bushfire destroyed the two-storey structure at 51 Upper Picton Road, Laventille, that housed nine people. However, the Trinidad and Tobago Fire Service, which Felix said responded quickly, told her she needed to wait a month for the official report. She’s still waiting.
“We end up with nothing. When those children come home, they didn’t believe us, we had to show them,” she explained.
Felix told Guardian Media that in the last five-and-a-half weeks, her sister and her children have been staying with family members in an already cramped space while she has been paying $300 for rent in a guest house.
She said someone from the MP’s office brought a mattress, but they have nowhere to place it. She was told to bring the fire report when they got it.
The house, she explained, was a wooden structure they got from their mother before she passed away, and since then, she and her sister had been renovating it. But all the progress went up in flames on February 26.
“We now fix this. We are still waiting for help. We are still waiting for anything people could donate to us,” she pleaded.
And because she’s still employed, the woman does not want monetary help but material to help reconstruct the house.
“Just for we to come back because it’s hard out there,” she cried.
She’s asking for bricks, gravel, cement, galvanise, and steel.
Anyone willing to assist Felix and her family can call 462-8132.