Three women who served time in prisons in the United Kingdom (UK) and have since returned to Jamaica to pick up the pieces of their lives, shared their experiences with the Sunday Observer on condition that the newspaper protect their identities. Here are their stories:

WHEN she left her dilapidated one-room wooden house in St Catherine for the UK in 2001, she was looking for a way out of poverty. She had stocked enough food to last her three children five days. That was how long her trip to London should have lasted

The desperate mom had left her five-year-old daughter and 10-year-old son in the care of their 14-year-old sister until she could get back with the £1,500 she had been promised to smuggle 720 grammes of cocaine into Britain.

This money could buy her and her three children several weeks' supply of food and some new clothes. It could also keep the children in school for a couple months. Against this background, the unemployed mom needed very little encouragement to ingest about 86 pellets of cocaine wrapped in condoms. If she made it through customs, she would pass these out later and hand them over to the dealer for the UK drug market.

But her five-day trip turned into a seven-year nightmare after she was arrested with the cocaine at Heathrow Airport in London. The woman was subsequently sentenced and locked away at HM Prison Morton Hall in Lincolnshire, home to more than 50 Jamaican prisoners at the time.

She was one of 98 women the UK police said they caught during the first eight months of 2001 attempting to leave Gatwick and Heathrow airports with drugs concealed inside their body cavities or luggage.

Debbie, 33, and Melissa, 31, also served time in UK prisons for cocaine. Their lives were not that different from this desperate mom, who still lives in fear of being "found" by the "people" who had given her the drugs to take to the UK almost 10 years ago. In fact, all three women shared a common bond. They were unemployed and had little or no skills, making them easy prey for the drug dons.

On a Friday, Debbie and Melissa shared their stories with the Sunday Observer at the Kingston office of Hibiscus Jamaica.

Debbie was sentenced to three years in 2002 for "importation of cocaine", but served only half that time. The mother of two children, aged nine and 13, said at the time she was desperate and wanted to secure a future for her children.

"Honestly speaking, I did need the money. I am from a poor family, and I used to do a little hustling. I used to go to my mom's stall and help her sell, but this could not take care of the two children, plus the rent, food and clothes," she said, adding, "I wanted better for myself and my children."

She therefore jumped at the promised chance of earning £3,500 to transport about half-a-kilo of cocaine into the UK.

"Somebody told me about this man who could make me go to England, and pay me money, and I went to him," she recalled. She had planned to use the money to purchase "an old car" to "start a little business" to assist her family. "I was going to use the car to run taxi to make some money, even though it would have been an illegal taxi," she said candidly.

She was given the option of swallowing the cocaine, but decided against it. "I could not swallow, and so they put it inside the suitcase (the handle)," she continued.

This was the first time Debbie was travelling, and she had left the children with family members, thinking she would only be gone "for about a month".

But when she got to London, she was stopped and searched by immigration at Heathrow. "The woman asked me to strip and squat, but they did not find anything. Then the man told her it was in the suitcase because the dog had sniffed it out," she said.

Recalling her time in prison, Debbie told the Sunday Observer that it was "tough" and that she was "scared" at first and missed her children terribly. "But I would write to them or call them as often as I could. I would also download educational stuff off the Internet and mail it to them," she explained.

During that period, she also got a chance to further her education, studying computer, Mathematics and English. "I also got a lot of support from the church (prison ministry); different denominations. The church helped me to survive," Debbie admitted.

She spent three months at Foston Hall and more than a year at Morton Hall before she was deported to Jamaica.

But even though Debbie tried to maintain contact with her children, she said the hardest part was returning home to find that she was a stranger to her children, particularly her daughter.

"She was a baby when I left, so when I came home she asked, 'who is this person?' She did not know me, and I felt very bad. She cried, and did not want to stay with me and I felt guilty, like I had done her wrong," Debbie said, her voice trailing off.

In retrospect, Debbie said she would have made different choices had she stopped to think about the consequences of smuggling drugs.

"My imprisonment had a great impact on the kids, and I had to work really hard to win back that love -- that bond that we once had," she said. "It is not worth it. I would say to any woman contemplating this: don't do it! It is not good, and the drug dealers lie; they cannot be trusted. They will use you and once you get caught, there will be no one there to help you."

Melissa knows all too well how it feels to be "used by drug dealers" and then discarded at will. She told the Sunday Observer that she was "set up".

"It was a big, big set-up," she said. According to Melissa, after she agreed to swallow "a couple pellets" of cocaine and transported the larger portion in a suitcase on a trip to the UK in exchange for cash, "somebody else pushed through the suitcase".

She explained: "When I got to Heathrow, I could not find the suitcase, and this made Immigration suspicious. It did look a way; here I was arriving for a visit without a suitcase. But what happened was that they got somebody else to push through the suitcase and left me hanging," she said.

Melissa said that after a search failed to turn up the suitcase, she was taken into a room and questioned. "They then told me that if I had swallowed the drug that I would die, and I got scared as I did not know that. Nobody had told me that," Melissa said. She "passed out" the portion of cocaine that she had ingested and was subsequently sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison, but she only served half that time.

Like Debbie, the former hairdresser said she rued the day she agreed to transport drugs to the UK.

"Life was tough, and I was struggling, but that decision turned into the worst nightmare of my life," Melissa said. "And to make matters worse, my little boy did not know me when I came home. He ran from me. You know how dat mek mi feel, yuh own pickney run from you?" She has three children, aged 12, 10 and three. The last one was born after she returned to Jamaica.

Her advice to women: "This is not a good road, don't let nobody fool you."

Today, the women still struggle to make ends meet, but they told the Sunday Observer that never again will they fall prey to "these evil drug dons".

Debbie is still unemployed and doing a little "hustling, selling slippers, Scotch-brite, steel wool and panties".

"I have applied for several jobs since I came back, but I can't seem to find any," she said. "I need a job. I have computer skills and I am willing to work."

Her dream is to own a house and further her studies in computers so that she can support herself and her children.

Meanwhile, Melissa, who operates a small grocery store, told the Sunday Observer that "business gone down since is me one". She is hoping that she can get some assistance to restock supplies.

The women get "some support" from Hibiscus Jamaica, but wish there were some additional programmes that would allow them to realise their dreams.