Travel
Jamaica Called. I Finally Listened
“I did not plan to become Jamaica’s witness, but when a hurricane tries to erase something ancient and beautiful, and the island refuses, someone has to write it down.”
The water is the colour of something that should not exist. Too blue. Too still. Too composed for a shoreline that, six months ago, took the full weight of a Category 5 hurricane on its chest and did not flinch. I am standing at the edge of Doctor’s Cave Beach: white sand, turquoise water, the quiet hum of S Hotel behind me, and I am trying to reconcile what I am seeing with what I know happened here. The beach is pristine. The resort is open. The staff moves with a grace that suggests not disaster, but intention, and somewhere in the distance, a woman is laughing.
I did not plan to become Jamaica’s witness, but when a hurricane tries to erase something ancient and beautiful, and the island refuses, someone has to write it down.
Letter to Melissa · Entry One, Dear Melissa,
I want you to know that I am here. Standing in the place you tried to take. You came in 2025 with everything you had: wind, water, Category 5 fury, and Jamaica absorbed it the way it has absorbed everything that has tried to break it for five hundred years. Imperfectly. Painfully, and then, again, stubbornly.
You took homes. You disrupted tourism. You made the outside world hesitate at the booking page, but you did not take the music. You did not take the beach. You did not take the people who, in your aftermath, built sixty homes in thirty days: guests and strangers and neighbours working alongside each other, because that is what this island does when it has no other choice.
I am here to tell that story. All of it.
— Simone Jennifer Smith
It begins, as most true things do, with a conversation. Late 2025. Chef Roger Mooking and I are talking about hurricane relief. We have already completed the initial deliveries in January 2026. The idea is to carry the mission through June, with Chef Brian Lumley as my anchor in Jamaica. We have a community of people who want to make this happen. We have momentum. We have intentions.
Then life does what it always does to plans made in earnest. It redirects.
February 2026. An invitation arrives. The International Music Conference (hosted by Shaggy) needs journalists in Kingston. The Jamaica Tourist Board hosts me at S Hotel Montego Bay for a property visit. This is followed by a special invitation for a property visit to the S Hotel in Montego Bay.
Then another invitation: a Mega Fam Trip, May 3rd to 10th, organized by the Jamaica Tourist Board. Kingston, Port Antonio, Ocho Rios. Twenty-plus international journalists from outlets including the New York Post, Black Enterprise, ABC News, NPR, Canadian Geographic, and Toronto Caribbean News , all converging on one island in one moment with one mandate: restore confidence in destination Jamaica after Hurricane Melissa.
Simone, somewhere over the Caribbean, February 2026…
“Why am I going back to Jamaica again?” Then, quieter, “Why does it keep calling me?”
Marcus Aurelius wrote that you have power over your mind, not outside events, but sometimes outside events have the power to show you what your mind has been circling without knowing it. Jamaica was the mission’s deeper form. The food deliveries were an act of care, but this, returning, again and again, to witness and to write, this is the act of love that care eventually becomes.
S Hotel: Resilience
Christopher Issa built the S Hotel to redefine what Jamaican luxury means: Jamaican-owned, boutique-scaled, adults-only, sitting directly on Doctor’s Cave Beach on what locals call the Hip Strip. What he got, as a bonus, was proof.
When Hurricane Melissa struck in 2025, S Hotel sustained no damage and remained fully operational. Every service ran seamlessly. The S Hotels Foundation shifted immediately to disaster relief: shelter, medical aid, food, supplies, while guests, reportedly, stayed and helped rebuild.
That is not a marketing story. It matters because of what it reveals about ownership: when the hotel is Jamaican-built, Jamaican-led, and Jamaican-rooted, its survival is communal. The hotel that did not fall helped pull up the neighbourhood around it.
I walk through the property slowly. The Sky Pool. The Irie Baths. The rooms that look out over Doctor’s Cave with a quiet confidence that does not need to announce itself. What I understand, standing here, on this beach, at this moment, is that the narrative about Jamaica after Melissa is not one the Jamaica Tourist Board can write alone. It needs witnesses. It needs voices that already carry the island in their bloodline. It needs Field Stage Journalism, journalism that does not observe from a distance, but enters the scene and lets the scene change them.
What does it mean to rebuild a place that was already, always, being rebuilt? Jamaica has been hurricane-struck and colonized and exploited and overlooked and celebrated selectively and loved incompletely, and it has survived all of it with a particular stubbornness that can only be called ancestral. The beach does not look devastated. The music has not stopped. The laughter I heard when I arrived is still happening somewhere I cannot see.
The Jamaica Tourist Board’s mission for my last press trip is stated plainly in the briefing documents prepared by JTB rep Candace Thomas, “Jamaica’s resilience and readiness must be showcased as we recover from Hurricane Melissa. We cannot deny that visitor’s buying decision is heavily influenced by media narratives.”
That is the story I am here to tell. Not Jamaica as victim. Not Jamaica as postcard. Jamaica as a place in active, sovereign, unfinished renewal, choosing, again, to be more than what tried to erase it.