HOUSTON \u2013 Jamaican families in Houston are anxiously following a powerful storm as it moves through the island. Despite widespread damage and internet disruptions, they are doing their best to stay connected with loved ones.<\/p>\n
Oral Cockett, a manager at GoldenKrust Caribbean Restaurant near NRG Stadium in Houston, has been in the city for just five months on a work visa. He is glued to his phone, waiting for updates from his family back home.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is video taken from the hospital and it was sent to you by your wife? How long ago? 30 minutes,\u201d Cockett said.<\/p>\n
His wife, Krystal, is a nurse on the island and has been at the hospital for hours, unable to leave due to floodwaters.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt has been a rollercoaster, because some of the times I check in, especially in the early part of the morning, the early hours of the morning, they had like current, they had signal and all of that, and they were saying, yeah, there was some rain, but it wasn\u2019t too much,\u201d Krystal said. \u201cAnd since I\u2019ve been here at work, I wasn\u2019t using the phone that much. I took a break. That\u2019s why I like a whole lot of… Messages coming in, updates, and the whole situation just got drastically worse within minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cockett\u2019s parents and sibling also live in Jamaica. He finds some strength by scrolling through memories saved on his phone as he waits to hear from them.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re all within the same parish. That\u2019s Manchester at Central Jamaica, but she is in Midland, like, in the center,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Jamaica is no stranger to hurricanes, but Cockett said this storm is different.<\/p>\n
\u201cCategory five, the wind. I\u2019ve never experienced that. They\u2019ve been hit or hit from a category five. We\u2019ve gotten a few three\u2019s and stuff like that. Like last year, Beryl was category three. And it caused a lot of damage. There was a lot floating. There was lot of breeze. We took months to get back power and to get everything back the way it should be, months. And that was a category three, so I can just imagine what you\u2019re going through with this category five,\u201d Cockett said.<\/p>\n
Though Cockett may not have family in Houston, he knows he is not alone. Stephan Anderson, founder of I Love Being Caribbean, which promotes the positive attributes of the Caribbean culture, is closely monitoring the situation and has begun mobilizing the Houston Caribbean community.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe beauty about Houston is that it\u2019s not just the Jamaican community that\u2019s feeling it. It\u2019s a Caribbean community. Whenever anything happens in the Caribbean, we respond as a collective because we\u2019re stronger that way,\u201d Anderson said.<\/p>\n
He added, \u201cWe\u2019re definitely going to respond. The only question now is how, because we have to know what the needs are. So if the needs food, medicine, then we\u2019ll do that. The needs are housing, whatever it is, the needs, we have to first figure out what those are and then we respond accordingly.\u201d<\/p>\n
Cockett said he has lost contact with his parents, who live on the coast, but he remains hopeful they are safe. For now, he is thankful for the updates from his wife.<\/p>\n
Copyright 2025 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"HOUSTON \u2013 Jamaican families in Houston are anxiously following a powerful storm as it moves through the island.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":25434,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[6889,17951,56,58,57,17085,17084,17952],"class_list":["post-25433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-caribbean","tag-disaster","tag-houston","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-hurricane-melissa","tag-jamaica","tag-response"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25433","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25433"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25433\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25434"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25433"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25433"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25433"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}