I was in the twin island state of Trinidad and Tobago for seven days in October. You know that you are in Trinidad when every other car and every maxi-taxi bears an oversized bumper sticker of the Soca Warriors. Of course, pictures of the Prince of Port of Spain, Brian Lara, were also quite evident but these are mostly on advertisements rather than on motor vehicles. Nevertheless, I got the feeling that the Soca Warriors had achieved national hero status as a result of qualifying for the World Cup. Someone told me that they achieved this status after their scoreless draw with Sweden. Maybe it can be argued that Brian Lara achieved national hero status in 1994 when be made 375 runs in Antigua.
During my stay in Port of Spain cricket was on everyone’s mind as the West Indies had just defeated old nemesis Australia in the first round of the Champions Trophy competition, thanks to a superb hat-trick by Jerome Taylor, who became the first West Indian bowler to achieve that feat in a One Day International. I entered a restaurant during one of the games and the waitress asked me if I needed a seat near to the television set so that I could watch the game. It turned out that she was watching the game herself and screamed every time the WI got a wicket.
Although sports, mostly cricket and football, featured prominently in the life of every Trinidadian I got the feeling that the main topics of discussion were crime and politics, in that order.
On the political scene, Ato Bolton, past Olympian, is now an opposition senator. How many of us know that he is the nephew of principal Rupert Hemmings? A few years ago Mr Hemming and I had a discussion about track and field and he mentioned that Ato was the son of his sister who had migrated to Trinidad and got married.
In the Trinidadian senate, Ato does not have it all his own way. One political reporter wrote in his newspaper column that at one sitting Ato was berated by a senator on the government side who noted with some amusement that the past Olympic sprinter had apparently read a bill with the same speed with which he used to run on the track (fast) with the result that he did not seem to understand the bill at all.
The debates in the Parliament appear to be animated and lively. Prime Minister Manning takes advantage of the divided opposition to score easy political points. I watched one episode of the budget debate where the PM chastised the Leader of the (divided) Opposition who had dared to suggest that the oil and gas reserves of Trinidad and Tobago were going to run out soon. The PM told the nation that there was no indication that the oil and natural gas reserves were going to be depleted in the foreseeable future and that the Leader of the Opposition had no idea of what he was speaking about. With all the infrastructure developments in the pipeline the PM was banking heavily on oil and gas and so he had better be right as far as the reserves were concerned. There is talk of constructing an ultra-modern high speed railway costing over a billion TT dollars across the capital. Some question if this is really needed or if it just represents the latest spending spree of the Manning government. No doubt there are also those who oppose the idea based on the NIMBY or not in my back yard syndrome.
Crime seems to be a major headache for the government and indeed for the people of Trinidad and Tobago. Kidnappings still occur; murders are apparently frequent, although while I was there most, if not all, of the reported murders seemed to be of the, ‘jilted lover kills ex-girlfriend’ type. Many compare the crime rate there with that in Jamaica and urge the government to take drastic steps to prevent the situation from getting worse.
I went to UWI one day, not to the St Augustine Campus that we are most familiar with, but to the new Mount Hope Campus which houses the veterinary, dental and medical schools. I ran into two young female veterinarians from Jamaica who were doing post-grad studies at the vet school. It was a surprise to me that the vet school had begun to offer post graduate courses (By the way tertiary education is now free in Trinidad).
The following day a few of us visited a Trini friend of mine who lives in an apartment complex adjacent to Canada Hall. Without any prompting from me, my friend remarked that the Jamaican male students on campus were very popular with the girls. We did not ask him how that popularity manifested itself and he did not elaborate, I suppose that he wanted us to use our imaginations. I had heard many stories about life on Canada Hall from my many friends and former classmates at KC who studied engineering in Trinidad up to the early eighties. What I gathered from them was that when it was time to beat the books they did just that and when it was time to party and “lime” those too were done with a sense of urgency as was the norm in Trinidad.
Which brings me to the popular Trini pastime of partying and liming. I left Trinidad on October 19th a public holiday called Divali or Festival of Lights. Three days later they celebrated another public holiday, this one was Eil-Ul-Fitr, the Muslim equivalent of Divali which is a Hindu festival.
Christmas is just around the corner and then it will be Carnival, followed closely by six weeks of World Cup Cricket. Since it is well known and accepted that Trinis love to party and lime at every opportunity one can anticipate that for the first four months of 2007 not much work will be done in the Twin Island State. It’s a good thing therefore that the oil and gas reserves are not going to run out anytime soon.
