Three months after the hurricane tore the roof from Rosalind Robinson's home in All Valley Jamaica, sunlight still slips in through places it shouldn't. The zinc sheets were replaced quickly, neighbors helping neighbors, doing what they could with what little they had. From the outside, the house looks repaired. But inside, the ceiling tells the real story.

Mold blooms across the weakened ceiling tiles, creeping along seams where rainwater still drips in each time the sky darkens. Rosalind wipes, dries, and cleans, but the dampness returns. She knows what mold means for a child's lungs, for their health, especially when they have nowhere else to go.

"I am so worried. I know the mold is not good. But what can we do? We take it one day at a time."

Her grandchildren sleep, study, and eat beneath that damaged ceiling. And they do it without electricity, without safe drinking water, and with next to no school.

A Childhood Interrupted

Hurricane Melissa ripped the roofs from homes across western Jamaica, destroying or severely damaging more than 190,000 buildings, including Rosalind's, and leaving 90,000 families struggling to rebuild. With 252 mph winds flattening houses, farms, roads, and community infrastructure across St. Elizabeth, Westmoreland, St. James, Hanover, and parts of Trelawny, more than 1.6 million people were affected, including the children whose schools were among the many public facilities devastated by the storm.

With damage this widespread, schools across the hardest hit parishes shut down completely. Some were used as emergency shelters, others were unsafe to enter, and many lost roofs, windows, gates, desks, books, and kitchens. In many communities, schools simply ceased to function.

Rosalind's fourteen-year-old grandson, Rajan, remembers the first day he returned: "When I went, it was all broken down. The windows were broken up, the canteen was shut off, the gate was blown off."

For three months, children had no school at all. When it finally reopened in January, children returned only two days a week to shared, crowded, makeshift classrooms. Raja learns in a place that no longer feels like school. His classmates have been scattered across other classes, and his grandmother complains that he has not had enough structure, not enough learning, and not enough connection.

Rosalind sees the change in her grandson. He struggles in class. He misses his friends. He watches his cousin return to full week schooling at another school and wonders why he cannot.

"I haven't seen a lot of my friends since the hurricane. They go the other day… I go today."

Across Jamaica, recovery has been slowed by the sheer scale of displacement and infrastructure loss. Families in the western parishes are still trying to rebuild while coping with damaged water systems, transportation disruptions, and heavy demand on emergency assistance. Community-level recovery remains stretched as agencies respond to hundreds of thousands of damaged structures and widespread need. All of this delays school repairs, leaving children like Rajan with only fragments of normalcy.

An Emotional Toll

The youngest children in Rosalind's family carry a quieter kind of fear. It shows up when the house shifts in the wind, or when the breeze picks up. In the months after the hurricane, they would stop her with the same question:

"Hurricane will come back, Mommy? Grandma?"

Children remember the storm not through timelines or damage assessments, but through sensations such as the noise of the metal roof lifting, the darkness when the power failed, the feeling of the family pressed together in one room while zinc sheets tore above them.

A Home That Looks Whole, But Isn't

Rosalind's home is "repaired" only in the quickest sense. The roof was nailed back on with whatever could be salvaged. The ceiling, soaked through, is now swollen and crumbling. Mold has taken root inside the fiber board. When it rains, water finds its way back in.

"It dry back… but whenever time it rain fall, it drip again because everything not solid."

She wants to fix it properly and she has a plan. But plans cost money, and after a Category 5 storm that left thousands of families without secure housing, every dollar goes first to food, to gas for the borrowed generator, and to school supplies for children who barely have school to attend.

"It's never easy but God be thanked we have life"

Despite everything, the disruption, the mold, the fears, the exhaustion, the ongoing lack of power and lack of clean running water, Rosalind ends her story with faith, gratitude, and a mother's steady courage.

"It's never easy but God be thanked we have life. And the children, they're all right. That's the main point."

Today, Rosalind's family, like tens of thousands of others, lives under one roof, but that roof hides a deeper need: for real recovery, and for the kind of rebuilding that protects children not just from the last storm, but from the next one too.