kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt
Sadness continues to overcome a New Grant family who lost their home in a suspected arson attack last Friday.
And while single mother Alana Isaac found temporary accommodation for herself, three children and two grandchildren, it is hard to make ends meet.
With years of hard work and sacrifice reduced to ashes, Isaac pleaded for help to rebuild the two houses destroyed in a seven-year-long land squabble.
Isaac, 43, left her Monkey Town Second Branch Road home that morning, leaving her two children, Ajani Holder, nine, and Arianna, Isaac, seven, at home as they felt tired.
Isaac, a custodian with the National Maintenance Training and Security Company, said she had to go to work at the Barrackpore West Secondary School as there was a sports day and the crew was short-staffed. She left $20 for the children to buy a loaf of bread at a nearby shop to eat with Barbecue that she purchased. But as the children went to the shop around 9 am, the fire started.
“When they left home to buy the bread, everything was OK. When they came back, my son told me, ‘Mommy, I smelled smoke.’ He thought it was bush fire and went to the side of the house down where the bricks were, and he saw fire in his sister’s home,” Isaac said.
Isaac’s older daughter, Shanika Davis, 27, lived in a house at the back. Isaac said it was in Davis’ front room, where she stored clothes, that caught fire. As the fire consumed Davis’ home, the wind spread the flames over to Isaac’s home, forcing her children to flee. Davis, a single mother of two sons, Jeremiah, eight and Nathaniel, one, was not at home.
Isaac said she knew the culprit but did not want to give details publicly.
