St Joseph mother, children endure years in collapsing home without water or electricity

A visually impaired single mother who has waited 18 years for government housing assistance is finally the subject of an official investigation by the newly-amalgamated Rural and Urban Development Commission (RUDC), following her urgent plea for help with her dangerously dilapidated home, Barbados TODAY can reveal.

Acting chief executive officer Russel Armstrong said he will also be following up with the officer from the former Rural Development Commission (RDC), whom the mother of four young children claimed was supposed to meet with her after the application was made in 2007, but never did.

The RUDC was formed in mid-February with the merger of the Rural and Urban Development Commissions as part of the International Monetary Fund-backed BERT programme.

“We are investigating the matter,” Armstrong told Barbados TODAY. “None of our clients will be lost. We have everybody’s records and everything; and anybody who has applied before, we have their records, and we will be dealing with them.

“We have a very good document system, so we know who was a previous client of RDC or UDC and they have all transitioned to the RUDC. So, it’s just a matter of allocating the resources to get to them. But we are going to investigate the matter and respond.”

Maurine Catlyn, a 44-year-old St Joseph resident, made a last-ditch plea on Thursday to be rescued from a shanty-type house that could soon collapse and seriously injure her and her children.

Catlyn said the urgent help she needs is for the commission – whose function includes constructing homes for vulnerable Barbadians – to build a new house on a nearby family lot.

The structure occupied by the single mother and two of her four children.

“I have the spot already,” Catlyn told Barbados TODAY. “I just would like them [RDC] to come and assist me in building a house. I got the spot…this is a family land. They [the government] gave me a paper and my aunt sign it off and everything. They asked me for land tax, I gave them the land tax, I gave them everything. An officer of Rural is supposed to come to me, and he hasn’t got here up to now.”

The woman, whose cramped plywood structure can only accommodate a bunk bed, a gas stove, and shopping bags of personal belongings, lamented that every time it rains, the single room takes in water. A gaping hole left by a broken window pane further exposes the occupants to the merciless elements.

The distraught rural resident, who is blind in one eye, pointed out that she has been living in the house, which is a throwback from the slave hut days, since 2016. Conditions, she added, continue to deteriorate with every passing day. The house is precariously perched on four columns of concrete blocks.

Catlyn, now unable to work due to an injury, said she had reached out to the former RDC since 2007, but to this day, all she has been getting are promises.

“Right now, my place dropping down, and it got holes, and my children does get wet when the nights come. I had applied to the One Family programme since 2023 too, and nobody hasn’t come to me neither. I went back to them and was told that a lady would be assigned to me, and that was since February last year. I haven’t seen anybody, nobody hasn’t contacted me. Nobody hasn’t reached out; nothing at all,” declared the desperate mother, whose children are aged 18, 16, 11 and five.

“I went to Rural in 2007 in Speightstown, and they aren’t helping neither,” she stressed.

The mother explained that if there is any consolation in the circumstances, it is that two of her children – the 16-year-old and the five-year-old – are living with her, and the others with her aunt.

“There is no running water, no electricity, no bath. My daughter has to use the bath as a girl, she has to walk over to my mother next door. I just want the assistance,” she declared. 

emmanueljoseph@barbadostoday.bb