For the past month, a 27-year-old woman and her two infant children have been living in a leaking duck and fowl pen with no food or electricity.
With no sign of help forthcoming, Maria Marcano is frightened and depressed. She looks on helplessly as her one-year-old son Kayron Alexander and five-year-old daughter Akela Williams cry for food at times. The children are often sick because of the inhumane conditions under which they live at Bandoo Trace Extension, St Margaret's Village, Claxton Bay. When it rains, the rotten galvanised roof leaks, wetting the bed. The vinyl covering the mud floor becomes muddy and slippery. Marcano uses bed sheets to cover the rotten galvanised walls to keep out the rain. Inside the tiny pen is a bed, a chest of drawers, television, radio and fan. She has no stove, fridge, running water or bathroom facilities. At her "home" yesterday, Marcano was close to tears as she spoke about how she ended up in this desperate situation. She said she once lived in a downstairs apartment of her landlady's house on the same property.
Marcano said she would take care of the landlady's ducks and chickens in the pen which has become her home. But when her landlady died last year, she was evicted. With nowhere else to go, she occupied the pen. Marcano, a heart and diabetic patient, survives on public assistance. Her daughter has been unable to attend school for the past two months. "Staying here is like a nightmare," she said. "If it was just me alone it was okay, but I have these two children...I had a very hard life growing up as a child and now like I seeing the same thing for my children." The children's fathers do not play an active role in their life. Without the owners' knowledge, she said she ran an extension wire from the apartment so she could get lights. But this has created a dangerous situation. The plugs and wires are exposed to the rain.
Pointing to a black piece of plastic covering the holes in the roof, Marcano said: "The night before, the whole thing come down on the children. Is a good thing I wrap them in a blanket and put a plastic over them, with only their faces out, so they did not get wet." She depends on people who know her to give them food. "The baby is still breastfeeding...Sometimes I don't eat nothing so they could eat," she said. The pen, she said, was also a home to mice and "biting ants." She has sleepless nights because the pen is not secure. She said: "I don't sleep. I sit on the end here. I keep a cutlass next to me because I am afraid. The dogs sleep in here, too, like a protection." "I spend my days grieving and crying, praying to the Lord and reading my Bible, hoping some day I will get out of this," Marcano added. She either uses rain water or fetches water from a standpipe on the main road. They use a neighbour's toilet facilities. Marcano has to wait until it gets dark before she takes a quick bath in the yard.
Marcano feels as though she has run out of options. She applied more than five years ago, and has reapplied to the Housing Development Corporation for a house. Marcano said that in January, she wrote to the HDC explaining her situation, but last week an official told her the company needed proof of her situation. Anyone willing to assist Marcano can contact her at 382-9429.
?Jearlean john responds
?HDC managing director Jearlean John said the HDC would try to assist her. She said what they do is ask applicants to send a letter describing their situation.
"Based on the circumstances, the social division will go out and examine the situation and send a report to us," she said. John said this would usually take a four-day period, but she promised to look into it.
