Pensioner pleads for house

SHIRLEY ROGERS is tired of roaming the streets, sleeping in bathrooms, living out of plastic bags. But that is exactly how this 65-year-old woman has been living since March 22 when she was forced to vacate her dilapidated home.Rogers has joined the growing list of elderly homeless people, but she longs to have a roof over her head again.The pensioner lived at Cypress Street, The City, for over 55 years, but the house became so old that she was forced to flee it when the back section and the roof collapsed.Roger said she moved into the house in 1955, with her husband just after Hurricane Janet hit Barbados.“My husband worked as the sexton at St Ambrose Church for years, but he died in 1988,” Rogers stated, as she pointed to the church opposite her house. She said during her younger days she did various jobs such as boning and selling fish and working in the sugar crop.Since 2003 she has also been going to the Urban Development Commission (UDC) to get them to repair her house, but she said the landlord “changed his mind” about giving the UDC permission to build a house on the land.“At first the landlord said it would not be a problem, but then he changed his mind, so the UDC told me they could not do it without the landlord’s permission,” she lamented.But Rogers said she still goes to the old house everyday since some of her belongings are still there.Asked about staying with her children, Rogers said one of them also lived on the streets while the others were unable to accommodate her.“I was staying by one of my grandchildren, but I get fed up with them and I had to leave. I can’t stay by nobody. The privilege that I would have by my house I can’t have by nobody,” she added.Rogers said she had spoken to her constituency representative Patrick Todd, who advised her to go to the National Housing Corporation but she had no money to purchase a house.“It hard pon me. I living pon the streets and I does sleep in the market and in bathrooms, and that ain’t nice. I need a house,” she pleaded.