ÐÓ°ÉÐÔ°É

When Ena Lucilla Campbell-Miller reached the age of 100 last December, she became the first person in her family to do so.

"I am 100 years, six weeks and a few days old, but the pain and all that, I can't do nothing, can't use the hand as before," the witty centenarian told THE STAR.

Sister Ena, as she is known, was born on December 15, 1921 to parents Edward Campbell and Mary Stewart-Campbell in Stonehenge, Westmoreland. She credits her longevity and relatively good health to a proper diet and consuming foods mainly from her father's farm.

Educated at the New Roads Elementary School and Carmel Moravian Church, Sister Ena said that her parents were farmers and recalled accompanying her mother to the Whithorn Market to sell the produce. While growing up, Campbell-Miller said her parents were very poor, and she had to work hard to earn her own bread. She did odd jobs as a domestic helper, a seamstress, and at times as a higgler, selling ground provisions and fresh fish to care for her parents and immediate family.

Campbell-Miller got married in 1977 to her late husband Herbert Miller. She has a son, Bim Cosley Williams, from a previous relationship, as well as four grandchildren, and countless great, great grandchildren. Campbell-Miller has seen many new inventions in her lifetime and admits that she is still coming to terms with having to use cellular phones to communicate, instead of sending telegrams with the postman.

But comparing the Jamaica of today to the one she knew while growing up, she said that the state of crime in Jamaica is more excruciating than the niggles and discomfort in her joints.

"Now I am surprised to how far it reach and [how] it look to me, I feel it's only God can remedy this," Campbell-Miller said of the wanton shootings and murders, especially in her parish. "The whole heap of shooting and murder, I never dreamed I could live to see all that. You nuh see my yard full of dogs. If some of them are even worthless, when all of them start to bark, they will wake us up so that you can call the police," she said.

Sister Ena's 84-year-old nephew, Ignatius Foster, says she means everything to him, noting that the centenarian played the role of a mother in his life.

"It was my aunt who was there for me. Even my two children, she is the one who took care of them," he said.

"It could not have been better. From a tender age until I was old enough to fend for myself, everything was she because I didn't grow up with my mother, '' Foster said. "She was the mother I grew up with until I left for England and I still acknowledge her as my mother today."