Rushing Relief to Jamaica

Samaritan’s Purse medical teams are caring for patients in Black River and isolated communities as relief efforts continue after Hurricane Melissa. Other disaster specialists are delivering critical supplies. Please pray.

Latest Updates

Updated November 14, 2025

• Our Emergency Field Hospital opened Nov. 5 in Black River and has treated hundreds of patients while scores more are receiving care through our mobile medical units working in difficult-to-reach areas of southwest Jamaica.
• We are providing survivors with water, shelter, hygiene items, solar lights, and other supplies. This includes nearly 400 Bibles provided to residents. Multiple airlifts have delivered more than 420,000 pounds of relief to the island.
• Many areas remain cut off by severed roads and bridges. Hundreds of thousands of people remain without power.

Our Emergency Field Hospital staff and mobile medical teams are meeting vast need as Jamaicans face days ahead without a working hospital or critical infrastructure. Multiple Samaritan's Purse airlifts so far have carried hundreds of thousands of pounds of emergency aid, and scores of disaster specialists to meet needs in Black River and beyond.

The local hospital in Black River, near where Hurricane Melissa made landfall as a Category 5 storm, was destroyed and nearly every other building was severely damaged. Our Emergency Field Hospital is filling the gap with 30 inpatient beds, plus an operating room, intensive care unit, emergency room, obstetric ward, laboratory, pharmacy, and blood bank.

Our helicopters have run dozens of missions to transport our mobile medical teams to inaccessible areas so we can care for those with no other hope of treatment. Doctors are seeing broken bones and terribly infected wounds that have not been addressed since the hurricane hit. Between these mobile units and our Emergency Field Hospital, we’ve already treated more than 750 patients, which has included more than a dozen of surgeries.

“Hurricane Melissa hammered a path of destruction across Jamaica, severely damaging homes, schools, hospitals, and businesses. Please pray for those who have lost so much and for our teams as we go in Jesus’ Name.”

Our community water systems are in multiple locations providing many thousands of gallons of clean water every day and we continue to distribute shelter materials, household water filters, solar lights, hygiene kits, and other supplies to families in need. We are working alongside dozens of local church partners to meet needs and minister to hurting communities in Jesus' Name.

Hurricane Melissa made landfall on Jamaica in the early afternoon, Oct. 28, as a deadly Category 5 storm with sustained winds of 185 mph. The island nation bore the brunt of the catastrophic storm—the most powerful storm on record to ever hit the country—with extreme storm surge, high winds, and torrential rain. This triggered flash flooding and landslides. Thousands of people remain in shelters, and the majority of the island is still without power.

Please be in prayer for all those affected by this major storm—the strongest on the planet this year.

Faith Through the Storm

Updated November 7, 2025

Patients in Jamaica praise God as Samaritan’s Purse provides critical care at our Emergency Field Hospital after Hurricane Melissa.

As Samaritan’s Purse continues to respond, working alongside local churches to meet the needs of suffering people, our medical and surgical teams at our Emergency Field Hospital began treating patients Nov. 5.

It’s been a race against time to help people living in communities cut off by the storm. Like most buildings in the community, the local hospital in Black River is now in pieces, leaving people in desperate need of medical care.

Team members rush a patient to the Samaritan’s Purse Emergency Field Hospital in Black River.

In the first two days alone, our medical teams served more than 75 patients, performing surgeries, setting fractures, and dressing wounds. Medical personnel are also sharing the love and hope of Jesus Christ with the sick and injured and their loved ones.

“I’ve had many patients that say their house was blown away, their medicines were blown away. They have no prescriptions left. We’re trying to fill in the gap for them,” Dr. Joe Lamb, a physician on our disaster assistance response team (DART) serving at the Emergency Field Hospital.

Dr. Joe Lamb, a longtime DART physician with Samaritan’s Purse, encourages an elderly patient brought in the first day of operation at the field hospital.

Unspeakable Joy and Peace

A woman named Jennifer was one of the first patients in the door but she didn’t walk, she was wheeled, with her foot gingerly wrapped in gauze. It was an old injury, made worse with time and insufficient care.

Jennifer smiles as she thanks a Samaritan’s Purse nurse who cared for her injured foot at the Emergency Field Hospital.

Even facing the possible loss of her foot due to infection, she still maintained her smile as she told our team repeatedly, “We give thanks to God. We’re giving thanks and we love you. I will give thanks to all who come to help Jamaican people.”

As she was leaving the hospital, assured her foot would fully heal, we asked her about her unspeakable joy considering all that she still has to endure after this storm and she quoted a Scripture familiar to many. “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (John 3:16).

During the storm she took neighbors in, thinking her elevated home would be safe from flooding. But her roof was no match for 185 mph winds that ripped across the island’s western coast.

“Plenty of people lost their houses, lost their buildings. If you see it, you would cry. Some people don’t have anywhere to go,” Jennifer said.

Lasbourne Ricketts is one such person, left homeless after the storm.

Lasbourne Ricketts meets with Samaritan’s Purse medical staff after losing his home and access to regular care in the storm.

He attempted to reach the local hospital for a routine treatment of a chronic condition. All he found was a field of debris where the facility had stood. With no access to medical care, he wasn’t sure what to do until our field hospital began receiving patients. He left all smiles, overflowing with gratitude, and covered in prayer.

Many patients visiting our hospital are like Lasbourne. They depend on regular medical care and reliable access to medication.

Donna, a diabetic and 59-year resident of Black River, came to us hoping we would have medicine. She’d never seen a storm like this one. It’s only by the grace of God, she says, that she’s alive today.

Samaritan’s Purse medical staff meet with Donna, a longtime resident of Black River, as she seeks medication and encouragement after the storm.

“He protected us. So you have to believe in Him and hold on strong. You have to hold on to Jesus right through the storm. We give God thanks we are here this morning,” Donna said.

Our patients are proud of their culture and proud of their faith – it makes for a hospital full of prayer and thanksgiving for the protective hand of God.

Treating Trauma After the Storm

Medical care can’t heal all the wounds left behind after Hurricane Melissa, many go beyond physical cuts, creating incredible Gospel opportunities for our doctors. Serving a patient can be quick, sometimes less than an hour, but have eternal impact.

Samaritan’s Purse doctors and nurses treat storm-related injuries and share Christ’s love with patients inside the Emergency Field Hospital.

“I always try to remind myself, and remind the patients, that I’m not the healer. Jesus is the Healer and the Great Physician,” Dr. Lamb said. “We look to Him for healing and we’re just His hands and feet and anyway we can enter into His plan, that’s what we’re doing.”

Please continue to pray for our medical teams, our DART staff, and local churches and that the people of Jamaica would experience God’s love in the midst of their suffering.

Just In Time

Updated November 5, 2025

After Hurricane Melissa's destruction, Jamaicans are thankful to be alive and grateful for the relief being provided by Samaritan's Purse.

Anthony Anderson stood atop a pile of rubble as he recounted the long, terrifying hours of Hurricane Melissa’s landfall in southwestern Jamaica. That same pile, where he’d returned to salvage what he could, had been his home in Black River before the Category 5 storm reduced it to splinters and into a crushing prison where he thought he’d pray and breathe his last.

“I counted myself a dead man,” he said.

Anthony survived Hurricane Melissa after being trapped beneath debris from his collapsed home.

He was pinned down by wood planks and heavy chunks of concrete as the storm roared. When the sky turned silent again, he grew desperate to escape.

“When I called for help there was no one to hear me,” Anthony said. “I said to myself, ‘If I stay here, I’ll die.’”

Then he saw a sliver of sunlight through the layers of heavy debris and began digging. He calls his survival a miracle.

“I should have needed a hammer or crowbars,” he said. “I only had my arms, and that’s why I think it must have been God Himself. God gave me extra strength that day.”

He returned after the storm to salvage what he could.

As he emerged, bruised and cut up, his community had been transformed into a miles-long debris field. Homes were gone. The local hospital was destroyed. He talked to others with the same look of shock that he was feeling.

Fellow residents described not knowing where to begin to put their hometown back together. In this hard-hit area of southwest Jamaica, the destruction is so complete that it makes it hard to catch your breath. Some neighborhoods were only accessible by boat after the storm.

A majority of the western portions of the island are still without power or access to clean water.

There is devastation across southwest Jamaica, where entire neighborhoods were flattened by Hurricane Melissa’s Category 5 winds.

“The saying goes ‘to pick up the pieces,’” one survivor said, “but here, there are no pieces to pick up.”

Anthony continues to remind himself and others in his community that God is still at work: “When God is in the midst, all things are possible.”

A Supply Chain of Relief in Jesus’ Name

Samaritan’s Purse has been responding to Jamaica since Melissa struck, and we are establishing relief efforts in Black River and other communities.

A Samaritan’s Purse nurse cares for a patient inside the Emergency Field Hospital in Black River, Jamaica, where medical teams are treating those affected by Hurricane Melissa.

Four airlifts have carried more than 100 tons of relief to the island. In addition to household kits, we are establishing an Emergency Field Hospital, setting up community water filtration systems, and providing household water filtration.

Our Emergency Field Hospital opened Nov. 5 and is equipped to provide Black River and surrounding communities with emergency medical and surgical care, obstetrics, and pharmacy and lab services.

We are working alongside community and church leaders to identify needs and provide supplies to hurting people.

Pastor Steve Hepburn was reeling when he arrived with two other leaders of New Testament Church at our first distribution on Jamaica. Residents, he said, have faced things they’ve never faced.

“Our church people and community folks are distraught. They are in a state they’ve never been in before,” he said.

Pastor Hepburn and leaders from his church were among scores of local church leaders who came to gather supplies from Samaritan’s Purse. Through the provision of 1,300 household kits, area churches are able to meet needs as families face heat and rain and nights without electricity. Each household kit includes shelter tarp, household water filters, and solar lights.

A Jamaican church leader collects tarps and other relief supplies from a Samaritan’s Purse distribution center to deliver to his community.

Many churches on Jamaica are connected with Samaritan’s Purse through Operation Christmas Child and through our response on the island after Hurricane Beryl last year.

“Samaritan’s Purse has come just in time,” Pastor Hepburn said. “You were here last year during Hurricane Beryl and you have been here many other times. You are touching lives. Pray that the hand of God will continue to rest upon our nation as we go through this,” he said.

Alric Brown, who serves with Pastor Hepburn, shared a similar heartbreaking story of whole communities that became homeless overnight as Hurricane Melissa churned along the western part of the island in violent winds and torrential rains. He was also praising God.

Volunteers and church partners work together at a Samaritan’s Purse distribution site in Jamaica to prepare emergency shelter materials for families affected by Hurricane Melissa.

“We’re giving thanks that there aren’t more lives lost from this storm,” he said.

Shana Barnett, who works locally with Samaritan’s Purse church partners through Operation Christmas Child, said she is grateful for God’s protection and His provision through our relief operations.

“We will rebuild. We will become stronger—the Lord is with us,” she said. “He has spared our lives so my prayer is really that the people will see that there is hope. They’re not alone at all. Samaritan’s Purse is equipping pastors to reach their communities and share Jesus Christ with them.”