Still Smiling: Meet “Outstanding” Maintenance Worker Delroy Greenland

When an old friend and former business partner called Delroy Greenland from Florida recently, he had a question.

“With everything you’ve been through,” the man said, “you still have a smile on your face. You don’t even have any gray hair! How do you do it?”

That comment may offer a clue as to why Mr. Greenland was recently named the Maintenance Cares program’s “Outstanding Maintenance Worker” in all of Brooklyn, just six years into his NYCHA tenure.

“Oh, I’m blessed,” Mr. Greenland said. “I’m blessed just to be alive and speaking with you today.”

The honor is the latest turn in a life that has carried him from Jamaica to Florida and then to New York City — through demanding work, painful loss, and a second chance at first love.

Born and raised in Jamaica, Mr. Greenland came to the United States at 25 to seek employment. In Florida, he joined thousands of his Caribbean compatriots doing some of the toughest agricultural labor in the world.

“I worked cutting sugarcane, yes I did,” he recalled. “Many thousands of us came and worked on the Florida sugarcane farms. And while yes, we held our heads high — boy, that work is tough!”

He took on the fullness of that labor for three full cutting seasons. In the off seasons, he founded a construction business and began building his new life. He married, raised two children, developed that business successfully, and began building a substantial real estate portfolio from its proceeds. But the marriage foundered, and the bitter divorce that was its end also cost him nearly everything he’d put together.

Mr. Greenland did not smile much as he recounted that chapter. Still, he “kept the faith” and kept on going, holding fast, as he’d been taught at home, to an “inner certainty” that better days would come.

And they did come — in ways he could scarcely have imagined.

As a young man in Jamaica, Mr. Greenland had been deeply in love with his childhood sweetheart, Merlene. But the pressure to find work drove him to leave his beloved and the only home he’d ever known. He jumped into that unknown future without telling anyone — not even Merlene — of his plan.

What he did not know when he took that fateful leap into the unknown was that Merlene was then pregnant with their son.

Heartbroken, Merlene moved to New York City to raise their son with her mother’s help. A thousand miles away, Mr. Greenland built a life in Florida, unaware that he was the father of a firstborn son.

Decades later, after his marriage had come to its sad end, he and Merlene found each other again. Only then did he learn about the child they share.

When he did, the once-again-unmarried Mr. Greenland scraped and saved and traveled to New York to see Merlene once more and meet their now-grown son. To their amazement and delight, the love that had blossomed in Jamaica had survived their decades apart. He closed his Florida chapter to open a new one with his long-lost family in New York, where the childhood sweethearts married.

He found work in construction and property refurbishment, first with a firm owned by one of Merlene’s cousins and then with another company. Then a colleague told him about maintenance opportunities at NYCHA.

He applied, was hired, and joined NYCHA, launching a third act of a career.

Mr. and Mrs. Greenland now live in Queens. Asked about his feelings of gratification toward his present work and life, he exclaimed, “Oh my yes — I am quite happy here!”