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For more than three decades, Joan Rowe has lived in a cramped wooden house in Tower Hill, St Andrew, where rainwater leaks through the roof and rats scurry across the ceiling.

Inside that space, she raised six children, buried three, and held onto faith even when nothing else held. Now, at 60, she's watching the yard she's long called home being cleared to make way for something she once only prayed for: a new home. The dwelling is being built under the Government's New Social Housing Programme. Launched in 2018 under the HOPE initiative, the programme focuses on replacing substandard informal housing with safe, affordable units. It works through three tracks - building on existing land, upgrading multi-family yards, or relocating vulnerable families - and so far has delivered nearly 300 homes to more than 1,000 Jamaicans across 63 constituencies.

The housing development, named Hibiscus, is being constructed where the old tenement yard once stood, a place with little privacy, poor infrastructure and barely enough room for the 12 people who live there. As demolition begins, Rowe, affectionately known as 'Juju', is staying close. While most of the other residents are relocating to live with family, she's building a temporary wooden structure at the back of the yard, using materials salvaged from her old home. She said she wants to remain nearby until construction is complete.

"Whatever wi get, I will most definitely be grateful," she said. Her current house, patched and weathered by years of storms, is in severe disrepair. Rowe and her children once used the outdoor stall that served as a communal bathroom for the entire yard. Five years ago, her daughter built a small bathroom inside the house from years of savings, an upgrade they still use at times. But shortly after building it, her daughter died suddenly.

"She dead inna the house pan the bed," Rowe recalled. "All now we nuh know how. She just sick and dead."

That loss remains one of many in a life marked by hardship. Of her six children, only three are alive. Today, Rowe helps care for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including two great-granddaughters who stay with her. She earns a living selling ground provisions by the roadside from a humble stall.

"It's not really a big thing, but it's my hustle. And it raised my children," she said. Rowe was born and raised in Tower Hill, and her resilience stretches back to childhood. At just nine years old, she was walking the streets with callaloo on her head to help her mother make ends meet.

"One day a police stop me and ask mi how old mi be. Mi tell him nine, and him seh him ago lock up mi mother. Mi cry and beg him not to. We never have a better choice," she said. Years later, after separating from her children's father, Rowe moved into the yard and began life in a single room she leased for $1,500. That room became the foundation of the home and the life she built.

"When mi get mi pickney, dem father never up fi dem," she said. "Even though mi never have much, mi take care a dem. Nuh through mi come from inna the ghetto."

Last year, when Hurricane Beryl battered the island, most of her family took shelter with a neighbour who had received a new home through the same housing programme during the pandemic. But Rowe stayed behind.

"Me alone out deh eno," she said. "Mi seh, 'Father God, just spare mi life, Jesus'. The breeze a blow hard eno," she recalled. Now, Rowe opined that this new opportunity and house are an answered prayer.

"Mi always beg God to do something for us, because mi try to live right by Him. Mi always pray and say God ago help me one day. We just nuh know when. But we just haffi have faith," she said. Now, as the old yard is torn down around her, Rowe sees this as a gift not just of shelter, but of restoration.

"Mi look at this like mi new chapter," she said. "Some people born in wealth. Some people haffi work really hard for it."