It’s been over 50 days since Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica.
That’s over 50 days that some communities in the hardest hit parishes of St. Elizabeth, Westmoreland, Hanover, St. James, Trelawny and Manchester have been without electricity, food, water and proper shelter.
To understand what happened in Jamaica on 28th October 2025, the world has to resist the temptation to flatten it into a simple “storm story.” What followed in the wake of the category 5 Hurricane Melissa revealed far more than wind damage.
The first images I saw after Melissa tore through the island didn’t look like Jamaica.
I kept waiting to see the kaleidoscopic range of greens and blues I’m familiar with, but they never came. “You expect a hurricane to still leave behind blue and green. But everything was left brown,” says Mina Robertson, 30, founder of conscious fashion brand Haveli. The wind, she explains, “exfoliated even the bark off some of the trees.”
What remained were pale, stripped trunks standing for miles like dystopian figures. Between them sat the debris of ordinary life: couches overturned in the road, concrete walls collapsed into themselves, entire homes reduced to scattered boards and rubble.
The word 'dystopian' stuck with me, because Jamaica is rarely allowed to be anything other than paradise. Disaster doesn’t fit neatly into that narrative.
In the days before the hurricane made landfall, people waited and waited for the storm to hit. On 25 October 2025 The Meteorological Service of Jamaica advised that the storm had increased to a category 1 and that it would intensify to a major storm system. “We were just sitting with this anxiety,” says Tonisha Kong, 39, a makeup artist. “That felt emotionally exhausting.” Preparation wasn’t just about boarding windows; it was about money.
“Having disposable income to prepare… is really difficult.” So, for many, proper preparation was a privilege. The Office of Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Management (ODPEM) and the prime minister advised people to seek shelter at designated shelter points: schools, churches, and community centres. But people in rural communities located in the hills of some Jamaican parishes either wouldn’t leave their homes, or couldn’t because of the labour it would take to make it to a shelter point.
When the storm hit the south coast of Jamaica on 28 October, the first thing to disappear wasn’t rooftops — it was contact.
“There was no way to contact anybody,” said Kong. “That was the scariest part.” Phones went dead. Electricity vanished. She drove through damaged roads just to reach her 79-year-old mother. “Not being able to contact anybody was terrifying.” When she got to her parents' house she found two scared and traumatised elderly people.
The five Jamaican women I spoke to all shared this sentiment. The silence on the island was absolute. The darkness that swallowed whole communities without electricity was disorienting and, for many, frightening.
In the storm’s wake, roofs were torn apart and scattered haphazardly across once-green yards, and roads collapsed beneath floodwater. Communities were left isolated because uprooted trees, cellphone towers and debris made entire roads impassable. Mobile networks went down, clean water became scarce in some areas, and daily life came to a halt. Once-busy marketplaces like the one in Black River, St Elizabeth — alive with vendors selling produce, loud music and the constant movement of taxis on tight roads — were reduced to rubble. In some neighbourhoods, a heavy sour smell lingered in the air, caused by stagnant water that had flooded homes and streets.
And then, as government systems stalled, these five women stepped up, lending relief in creative and impactful ways.
They didn’t wait for instructions or official mandates. They moved with what they had: cars, access to warehouses, WhatsApp groups, family businesses and borrowed trucks. Some were on the island, navigating roads that no longer existed. Others were thousands of miles away, watching the destruction unfold from screens, paralysed by distance.
After the storm hit, Mina packed her Starlink — a portable satellite internet system that provides connectivity through low-Earth-orbit satellites — and hit the road to reach severely damaged communities in the red zone. After the hurricane, Starlink has become essential across the island, allowing residents, organisers and aid workers to stay connected when traditional networks fail.
“I cannot build 10,000 houses, but maybe I can give one mother a bit of relief. One child in London who hasn’t heard from her parents or grandparents,” Robertson explains. She has helped residents make phone calls to their family and friends on and off the island, offering a simple but vital message: I’m alive.
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Another no-brainer for Robertson was to check on Thickets, a community located in the parish of St. Ann. During the pandemic she had launched a bracelet-making initiative in the community to help generate income. She provided materials, ran training sessions, and sold the pieces through her physical Haveli store. The proceeds were then reinvested directly back into the community.
When former Miss Jamaica Universe and entrepreneur April Jackson, 36, watched the aftermath of Hurricane Melissa unfold from thousands of miles away in London, the scale of the damage was overwhelming. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” she says. “I don’t think for the first two weeks there was a day I didn’t cry.”
She jumped into action, offering shipping discounts and aid through her family’s company, W.I Freight, one of the largest shippers to the Caribbean. Her family’s business was quickly overwhelmed by demand, particularly from people who had never shipped anything before. Instead of turning them away, they supported them through the unfamiliar process.
“We launched two shipping days,” Jackson explains. “We had extra staff to help people physically pack. You could bring your things from Asda, not know what you were doing, and we would facilitate everything.”
On the ground, Tonisha was reaching rural communities that aid wasn’t. She began buying and delivering supplies on her own, before eventually being joined by others from the creative community. She set up an Amazon registry – tarps, nails, water, food – whatever would arrive fastest. But the emotional toll was heavy.
“It was hard going back home,” Kong admits. “We get to go back to our beds. These people are sleeping outside. They had homes two days before the hurricane.”
That contrast lingered. It followed many of the women I spoke to, including recording artist and actress Naomi Cowan.
With deep familial roots in St. Elizabeth, one of the parishes hit hardest by the storm, Cowan took action alongside her family. She described seeing houses broken apart, uprooted trees, and power lines strewn across roads by heavy winds. Just two weeks before Hurricane Melissa, she had released an album she describes as a love letter to Jamaica.
“I used my album as a way to display the beauty of Jamaica,” Cowan says. “So here we are now, and all that beauty is gone.”
When she went out to help clean up, distribute food, water, and supplies, what stood out to her wasn’t despair, but dignity. “Everyone was just so grateful for life,” she says. What Cowan is describing is a familiar Jamaican truth. No matter what, people will find things to be thankful for.
Filmmaker, activist and granddaughter of Bob Marley, Donisha Prendergast, 40, has gone viral without trying, because her work in the parish of Westmoreland has spread far beyond Jamaica. Her film Threads Of Us — an unexpected love story derailed by a wrongful accusation — was due to premiere just four days after the storm.
“I found myself in Westmoreland on the day that my movie was supposed to premiere,” she explains, “because the mother of my film’s lead actress – singer Sevana – was impacted and needed support.”
She couldn’t have predicted what would come next.
As Prendergast describes Westmoreland’s lack of resources, the scale of the neglect is impossible to ignore. The parish has just one fire truck; a comparison akin to the entire city of London relying on a single engine. Emergency responders were never prepared for devastation of this magnitude. “The police also will tell you that they were never escalated to more than (regular) day-to-day operations, they were never escalated to emergency,” says Donisha. “ And the same thing with the firefighters. None of them were given any additional tools to respond.”
She couldn’t turn away from what she was witnessing. “We found an entire shelter of humans in Petersfield, Westmoreland with no food, no water, just trauma. No structure. No anything,” she says. Even through a laptop screen, her disbelief is palpable. Donisha and her team drove through four feet of water to get to this shelter all without formal resources or government support. They found nearly 200 people there, all coming from the 15 districts that make up Petersfield.
“We had no titles, no government agency behind us,” she says. “So when we were able to do that much, that’s why I say I’m angry at the government. I really thought they would come in with strength.” Instead, she says, officials arrived with “notebooks and pens to assess”, often speaking to survivors in ways that failed to recognise the scale of their trauma and loss.
Donisha comes from a lineage rooted in resistance, service, and care. Values embedded in the Marley family’s work on and off the island. But she was careful not to centre legacy over labour. When she arrived in Westmoreland, she wasn’t there as a name or a symbol; she was there as a human responding to other humans in crisis.
“Hope has been hard to come by this year. And yet we persist.”
It started with me and volunteers,” she says. Within days, those volunteers had become an organised network with trucks and skilled workers. Her phone turned into what she calls “an emergency hotline.” Her team has built a database of almost 1,300 names of people who need help. Every day, bikers ride into communities in the hills, delivering aid where bigger vehicles can’t reach. They have been able to give out 400 gas cylinders, 2000 gallons of gas to a community of over 300 people. Not to mention helping people cycling through the shelter daily.
“This hurricane didn’t happen to Jamaica,” Donisha says plainly. “This hurricane happened to the poor people of Jamaica.”
In moments like these, people often talk about supplies. Donisha talks about what’s still missing even when food arrives. “Medical support, mental support, somebody to hug them and sit with them,” she says. “Simple things that are overlooked, especially the children.”
When the headlines fade and the news crews leave – this is when the real work starts. While global attention is moving on, many communities across Westmoreland, St. Elizabeth, and neighbouring parishes are still without electricity, clean water, and safe shelter. Grassroots efforts, such as the ones being carried about by women like Mina Robertson, Tonisha Kong, April Jackson, Naomi Cowan and Donisha Prendergast, continue to fill the gaps.
To support ongoing efforts, you can donate to:
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