Annex II - Overview of the women who served as case studies

Auntie

Auntie is a 50-year-old squatter who lives on the Causeway and supports herself and her children by means of fish vending. There are I 1 people in her household. Five of them are children.

Carmen

Carmen is in her mid-forties and lives free in a yard on East Street in Central Kingston. She has six children, five of whom live with her. She survives by doing days work as a domestic and does a little selling as well.

Deula

Deula is 40-years-old. She is married but her husband lives abroad. She lives in a hillside squatter community known as Highlight View in a two-room house which she built herself and which she shares with her four children. She sometimes works as a domestic but also makes money from a small farm she cultivates on captured land.

Icie

Icie is in her early forties and married to an elderly man who is totally dependent on her. She has had 12 children and nine of them still live with her. One is mentally retarded. She lives in Hermitage, not far from the University, and earns her living cleaning and washing for students on the campus. She is currently buying the land that her house is on.

Lena

Lena is 36-years-old. She lives with her four daughters in a house that she owns in a yard in Cassava Piece. Cassava Piece has recently been upgraded under a Government-sponsored squatter- upgrading scheme. However, Lena has not experienced any direct benefit from the upgrading as the first occupier of the yard who is Lena's landlady was the person who was able to buy the land. Lena pays spot rent to this woman for use of the land on which her house rests. She works as a cook in a Kingston hotel.

Letty

Letty is 79. She lives with a 30-year-old grandson on land she owns on the periphery of Kingston. She supports herself as a landlady, letting out residential units she has on her land.

Marcia

Marcia is 28 and lives by herself in a furnished apartment which she rents. She has two children who live in the country with her mother. She works as a hairdresser/cosmetologist.

Megan

Megan is 30. She lives with her four children and her sister in a one-room board house on captured land. The area where she lives is highly politicized and considered a ghetto. She earns her living as a higgler. Her sister works in the freezone as a machine operator in one of the so-called 807 factories.

Pam

Pam is 32. She lives with her mother, her sister, a niece, a nephew and her two teenage sons in Tavern. They have two rooms in a three-room house and pay rent to the landlord who has a lease on the property. She works as an office helper.

Pansy

Pansy is a social worker who lives at Standpipe in Liguanea. She is in the process of buying the land she has built her house on from the Ministry of Construction as part of a squatter-upgrading scheme. Six children and nine adults live in the six-bedroom house.

Pearl

Pearl is 34 and lives off Waltham Park Road with her four children. They live in a single room which she rents from her father who has a lease on the house that the room is attached to. Pearl works in the freezone and has Just joined a women's housing cooperative in the hope of finding herself a more suitable place to live.

Verona

Verona is 55. She lives with her daughter, her son and three children on captured land in Delacree Pen. She makes a living running a small shop where she sells basic supplies to the other people in the area.