When Hurricane Melissa hit the island nation of Jamaica Oct. 28, it had reached its peak intensity, becoming the strongest tropical hurricane of 2025 and the strongest storm to have ever hit the country.
 
In Melissa’s wake, a team of four Texans on Mission volunteers - Melanie and Robert Howington and Mindy and Robert Watson - were on the ground in just a few days, assessing damage and planning TXM’s broader response.
 
Within a week, a full team arrived in the heavily damaged port town of Montego Bay, providing temporary roofing and food relief to churches, hospitals and communities in the area.
 
Wendell Romans, who served as Incident Management Team leader for the first response, said the hurricane’s devastation was immense.
 
“I've been through a lot of disasters, I've attended a lot of disasters,” he noted, ”,and this is absolutely the worst one I've ever seen. There are so many houses that are gone, are uninhabitable, roofs gone, and our purpose here is to witness to those people as we get a chance and to help them try to get a little bit of comfort back in their lives.”

Local resident Renoy Farquharson was among the survivors of the storm. He said Melissa "devastated the community. A lot of people lost their homes, and the road and other infrastructures are badly damaged. No power, no water from that day until now.”

Farquharson said his own home was destroyed in the storm. “My home was a board structure, and it got blown down. Most people with concrete structures got damaged windows and doors.
Trees fell on most of them and damaged our vehicles as well.”
 
John Hall, TXM chief mission officer, called the Jamaica response “our biggest international relief effort since Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. 
 
“We have continuously had teams serving in Jamaica since Hurricane Melissa hit, providing temporary and permanent roofs and distributing about 120,000 meals to people who have not had any food in two weeks or more,” he said in November, adding, “We are providing crucial care to the most vulnerable, including the elderly and the physically challenged.”

With the scale of the damage so broad, TXM continues its efforts and is working with collaborative partners On Mission Network, North Carolina’s Baptists on Mission, and the Baptist General Association of Virginia’s Impact Missions. 
 
Dennis Mahoney of On Mission Network put the scale of the hurricane’s damage into perspective: “A third of Jamaica has been affected by the storm. So imagine if a third of the United States had lost their house, their food, everything they own. That's almost incomprehensible, right?”

 He said the hurricane left Jamaicans with destroyed homes, sewage in homes, waterborne diseases, mosquito bites and massive food shortages. “And if you think about the trickle-down effects, a lot of these folks were farmers, so all the agriculture has been destroyed, all the coconuts are out of the trees, all the pineapples have been destroyed. What's that going to mean two months from now, a month from now, three months, six months — when they don't have a source of income?

“It's so important that people engage, and we all have a next step, whatever that may look like. That might be praying, that might be going, that might be checking in on your Jamaican neighbor who lives in the United States,” Mahoney said. “And so we're excited for folks to engage with this because this is what the church is all about. The projects are the process to reach out to the people and for us to really show Christ’s love to folks.”
 
Among the tasks taken by TXM responders was providing temporary and permanent roofing for “infirmaries,” facilities that combine medical, senior care and mental health care, to Jamaicans in need. 
 
TXM volunteer David Talbott commented that the infirmary his team was re-roofing “used to be an infirmary during COVID time, but then they converted it to taking care of the elderly. If you can only imagine an elderly person living in some place that doesn't have any roof on it, you know they need assistance. So when we are finished here, they will furnish them for elderly care.”


Hall said TXM teams will continue to provide disaster relief through January, then change its mission to working with its partners to build 12’X8’ “tiny homes” to house families in some of the most hard-hit areas in the country. 
 
Howard Nelson, district overseer and pastor of Riverside New Testament Church in Dias, Jamaica, called the response by TXM and its collaborators “a wonderful thing, because currently the On Mission Network is giving care packages to families, and these care packages will go a long way in helping to provide basic needs, such as that which is personal hygiene needs, and also some food supplies.”

He also emphasized the hope and encouragement volunteers brought along with the work and aid. “I believe that there are persons now, based on where they are, they are feeling hopeless, and they are also feeling helpless. Some persons might feel lost, and they need to know that they don't have to be lost, because God knows them, and he knows who they are.”