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It took just minutes for a fire to erase what took years to earn.

Michaela Richards, affectionately known as 'Strawberry', recently graduated from Holy Trinity High School. Her diploma, still crisp and new, was packed safely inside her bedroom drawer. But when fire swept through a tenement yard on Price Lane in Kingston on Tuesday afternoon, it didn't survive the blaze.

"I want back my home," she sobbed. "It's not the house I grew up in, but it's where I spent most of my time. Mi affi keep trying. I have nothing left, but I have to keep trying just like mi see mi mommy trying."

The fire displaced several families and gutted every room in its path. Among the hardest hit was Richards' family, who lost not only clothes and furniture, but the documentation that charted a young woman's journey out of hardship.

"It was just a piece of paper," she said softly, "but it was mine. It show say mi work hard and graduate."

Her mother, Melissa Blackwood, had left the house only 20 minutes before the fire began. She'd woken her three children early and told them to head to their aunt's house up the road.

"Seriously, my house burn down and all I could think about was my kids," Blackwood said. "When I got the call, I say thank God I sent them away."

The family lost everything: school records, baby documents, clothes, furniture, and even HEART/NSTA Trust application papers. Richards had just submitted an interest form for a cosmetology programme that very morning.

"I just want to learn the skill," she said. "I was applying to learn something mi passionate about. Mi like fix people hair... mi like make people feel good."

Now, nothing remains but soot and separation. Blackwood and her youngest daughter are staying in Portmore, her son is with his stepmother, and Richards is sleeping at her aunt's dwelling. The closeness of the family, once their only constant, has been fractured.

"We not used to being apart," Blackwood said. "It's me alone doing this. Mi affi be strong."

She's lived on Price Lane for 25 years. Just four weeks ago, she began renting a small restaurant space, trying to build a better life. She also works full-time at a print shop.

"Things were going so well," she said. "And now this. Mi come home and mi just stand up... nothing was saved. Nothing."

As smoke curled from the rubble, the remains of everyday life, warped pots, broken fans, and soot-covered school shoes, were scattered across the yard. Amid the wreckage, Richards' grandmother stood holding her granddaughter tightly, her own eyes wet with tears.

The Jamaica Fire Brigade said the cause of the fire remains unknown and investigations are ongoing. But for Richards, the fire already made its mark, not just on her home, but on her future. Still, she says, she's not giving up.

"Mi have nothing left. But mi still affi try," she said. - A.L.