‘I just want to go for a drive’
Portmore residents battle frustration, depression amid COVID-19 lockdown
FOR YEARS, residents and political representatives in Portmore, St Catherine, have bragged about the so-called Sunshine City’s self-reliance, even calling for the municipality – with its myriad of shopping and resource outlets – to be declared a parish.
Over the last week and a half, that self-sufficiency has been tested by the Government’s COVID-19 lockdown of St Catherine. And for many Portmore residents cooped up in their hot, concrete dwellings, the restrictions on movement have started to take a toll on them.
St Catherine has recorded the bulk of the island’s COVID-19 cases after an outbreak at the Alorica call centre triggered a surge over the last two weeks. The parish was initially placed under a seven-day lockdown, which was further extended by a week last Wednesday.
Only essential workers as named in the order are permitted to leave St Catherine, and residents can only leave their homes at specified times and days to replenish home supplies and medicine.
With the closure of many fast-food, recreational and service outlets, along with an order for the wearing of masks in public and the checkpoints at the border, Portmore life, as many residents know it, has transformed.
“Some people come and tell we that they only want to go for a drive, and if we can let them out to drive and come back. They say all type of foolishness, but we can’t allow them,” said a policeman manning a congested checkpoint near a roundabout on Municipal Boulevard.
By midday last Saturday, the cop said he had turned back at least a dozen residents who were trying to exit the municipality without good reason.
Rosie Watson, a shopkeeper in 2 East Greater Portmore, complained that the restriction was having a negative effect on her business.
“It is unfair to us corner shops because I think the Government should make a way so we go through [the checkpoint] go buy goods for the shop. How the supermarket can get to go and restock? The goods more expensive in Portmore and everywhere already packed up over here. I need to go downtown,” she argued.
“Remember, corner shops sell different people from the supermarket,” added ‘Skinny’, who operates a grocery and snack shop in the tough informal Newlands community.
“People in the garrison buy a pound a flour or a tin mackerel as them get a money. So all up to 1 0’clock [in the night], if a man come, me still have to try push out something for him,” Skinny added.
He and Watson’s fellow shopkeeper, ‘Kerry’ in Cumberland, witness daily the hardships that the COVID-19 lockdown has triggered in their communities, and with no end in sight, they fear the worst. Informal communities in Portmore, they explain, are feeling the negative effects more than other areas.
Even as their businesses take a beating from restricted opening hours, they say they try their hardest to maintain the essentials for the less-fortunate community members. The demand for bread, cup soup, syrup, water and ice has risen in recent weeks.
“Just the other day, I bought some bread from the truck and within five minutes all a dem done!” exclaimed Kerry.
FRUSTRATION
While many residents rushed to wholesales out of a confessed need for supplies or simply to escape the confines of their homes before the shopping day wound down, others – like a group of pensioners outside the Greater Portmore Post Office – watched in frustration as the hours went by.
Despite arriving before daybreak, some of the elderly clients complained that at midday, they were told that they would have to wait another hour as the pension allotments had run out.
Luckily, 72-year-old Greater Portmore resident Silvan Williams collected his $5,000 a week earlier. As he scanned the crowd of frustrated persons outside the
Greater Portmore Mall, he anxiously dialled his also elderly spouse. She, he explained, was somewhere in the chaos, trying to get inside to purchase medication.
COVID-19, according to Williams, was the “rapture” being fulfilled, and after grabbing medication and food supplies, he and his wife would be heading right back to their home, he assured.
“Government say we must lock up. But if we lock up, nuh dead we going to dead from hungry? You know how long I don’t get to work?” exclaimed a resident in Newlands, who came up short for goods he tried to purchase at Skinny’s corner shop last Wednesday.
“I just can’t do this anymore. I can’t take it,” lamented a pregnant woman waiting in line outside a Western Union outlet in the Portmore Mall. She was later ushered to the line for the elderly, which was only a few metres shorter than the general queue.
In Independence City, Councillor Courtney Edwards spent much of Wednesday morning spray-painting footprints to depict the prescribed six-feet social-distance spacing at the entrances to wholesales in his area. Later on, wholesale workers erected rope barriers at the said entrances, which caused frustration and a brief squabble among shoppers who had been gathering outside since the crack of dawn.
The Cedar Grove Plaza was also a crowded maze as residents swarmed an ATM, a money transfer outlet and a water purification station there. One woman said she had been waiting outside for more than four hours.
In the meantime, fisherfolk on the quaintly silent and deserted Hellshire Beach last Wednesday said that they, too, are feeling the pinch. While they have accepted the move by the Government to close the popular beach, they said that they are going hungry as the Coast Guard has barred them from fishing.
“We don’t want any outsiders in here … For our safety, we get that, but this is not just a beach; it is a village. When you – the Coast Guard – lock we down and say we can’t fish [and] we already can’t go buy none outside, so how we find food for our family to eat?” one man asked in frustration.