Hello everyone,
Our names are Kyle and Zain and we're here to help raise some funds for our best friend Miguel and his family after they lost both their generational family home as well as a new home that they were in the process of building due to Hurricane Melissa. Videos and pictures will be added and updated as they are received from Miguel.
Here is a little bit about Miguel and his family, and the circumstances that existed before Hurricane Melissa ravaged his home and community.
Miguel Dunkley and his family live in the community of Wakefield in the Trelawny parish of Jamaica, a community that lost almost everything due to the hurricane. His community amongst many others on the northwest part of the island suffered immense, life changing damage. Miguel, a video editor and online enterprise/social media guru by trade, ran his entire business from his family home, from which he made the money to support the at least 5 family members who lived there. The house typically consisted of Miguel's elderly grandmother, Miguel's school aged nephews, Miguel, and his spouse, all sharing very tight quarters. With his family house being a bit older and starting to be unable to accommodate the amount of people living in it, Miguel increased his workload to make some extra money and start building a house on some nearby land in order to offer his family a better life with more space and more safety and reliability due to being more extreme weather tolerant.
Between Miguel working about 20 hours a day 6 days a week, his significant other working a full time job all the way in town, and the cost to support a family ever increasing, they often struggled to make ends meet and achieve the goals they had set out for themselves. Over the course of what was about 1.5 years, Miguel and his spouse worked themselves to the bone and were able to put enough money aside to pay for the land lease and to get the new house started being built. At the moment Hurricane Melissa struck, the new house was about 85% complete, with only a few small things left to do before they could start moving in. After the hurricane sat over them for as long as it did, it not only destroyed their generational family home by crushing it with a tree before blowing or flooding most of the rest of it away, the hurricane then also destroyed the new home they worked so hard to build.
Even with hurricane tolerant anchors, roof and wall screws, hurricane straps, and a concrete foundation, the destruction that a sustained Category 5 hurricane can do to even a well prepared home is unimaginable. As you can see in the main video of this campaign, the new house is no longer standing and due to flood waters and winds, isn't currently recoverable in that state. The hurricane hit the north coast of the island and squatted, while expanding in size due to excess abundance of seawater. Miguel and his township sat in or near the eye wall of the storm for 2-3 hours. Even if we didn't have to watch it in real time, the destruction he has shared with us is evidence enough.
Because of the mutual destruction of both homes, Miguel and his family have been forced into homelessness with little to no way of making any kind of money to move forward out of that situation. Everything they had, everything they needed to continue working and making a paycheck was taken away in the blink of an eye. We're hoping to remedy that and give them every opportunity to get back on their feet as quickly as possible.
After a tense 72+ hours of no contact, we are in contact with Miguel every day as many times a day as he can manage to get service and power on his cell phone. He has relayed to me that he has to pay each time he wants to use the internet or the generators to charge his phone at the moment because of the lack of emergency response. Due to where his township is, the roads have been nearly impossible to navigate in order to have aid delivered and emergency relief to be offered for those who remain completely homeless like Miguel and his family. Some reports we've read from the Jamaican Information Service have noted up to 4 inches of sand on top of roadways that may or may not be washed out as well. Miguel confirmed this to us yesterday when we spoke on the phone, that the roads that weren't still flooded (it continues to rain on his part of the island so most of the flood waters haven't receded yet), were covered in a layer of dirt and sand that will take a very long time to clear up.
He has also indicated to us that the township is and will remain without water or power for upwards of two months, maybe longer. The water system in his township is operated via a powered pump and so as long as the power remains disconnected, the only way his community will have running water will be when the relief effort is finally able to get to his township and offer a generator to get some water flowing. Granted, this will not fix the lack of power in the community but it will at least bring some fresh water to a community that has been surrounded by stagnant water for almost a week now.
Miguel has asked me to set this GoFundMe up in order to help provide some relief to his family and himself while they struggle to come to grips with being homeless at the moment, with no way to do his job and make money to move forward, while there is no running water or power to help get them on their feet to potentially even move forward, in a part of the island that is devastated so badly that even if none of the above had happened, there is not much to seek out in the ways of employment or earning money in the NW part of the island right now.
So we are here, trying to support our best friend and a man that has carried the entire weight of the world on his back for so many years while he tried to make something out of nothing to provide a better life for a family that deserves nothing less than. Zain and I are already sending money directly to Miguel just to help provide them time with their neighbor's generator for charging power banks and their cell phones, data for the internet in order to see what they can do to help bring the aid into their community faster, and to provide him with the ability to buy what few goods he has access to in order to provide for his family during this ridiculously trying time of destruction and homelessness for this wonderful man and his beautiful family.
Please help us restore the Dunkley family back to whole again, help us protect the elderly and children of a family that is currently without a way to do so themselves. We greatly appreciate any and all donations to this campaign and as time progresses, we will continue to post more videos and more pictures when Miguel has the data available to send us them.
I am adding a picture of their flattened house along with more videos to this post in hopes that it gives more context of what Miguel, his family, and his township are dealing with at this moment in time.
Thank you so much for taking the time to read this and please, not just for Miguel and his family but if you can, help as many people and causes you are able to for Jamaica because the devastation is so vast that the island may never be the same again if we don't help.
As Miguel would say, One Love Everyone
Thank you again <3
