Trinidad and Tobago is a place where, for what seems to be the majority of the populace, words often fail miserably. The classic Trinbagonian response, outside of the tourist environs of Port-of-Spain (and often within them) is to emphasize matters with a cutlass.
With cutlasses at their necks, truck drivers are being hijacked by desperate villagers to deliver water to certain parts of the country...
I suppose this must seem atrocious to the larger audience of the global village, but it's just the way things happen in Trinidad and Tobago. It happens in similar ways around the world, I know - but here in Trinidad and Tobago the government likes to see this happen. Which means, by extension, the people of the nation like to see it happen. Which means, by extension, that the people wielding cutlasses and the people who have the cutlasses held to their necks, like to see it happen. That would be how democracy works.
Now that I have that sarcasm out of my system, I do have to wonder how the infrastructure for the country is planned. Phone lines, electricity and water should be, at the least, available to everyone in Trinidad and Tobago. And yet, here in San Fernando, I haven't had pipe-borne water for over a week and a half. Really.
If you have employees of WASA being threatened with cutlasses at their necks, it makes the newspapers. It even gets blogged about. But the indifference of government as related to anything outside of Port of Spain continues, despite elected representation for all the areas affected.
The word on the street is that Trinidad and Tobago has sunk below the status Guyana had in the 1970s; Patrick Manning's regime in Trinidad and Tobago is beginning to look a lot like the Forbes Burnham regime of Guyana. But when we have cutlasses at the necks of people delivering water, it becomes a shade of Haiti. The Prime Minister meets with 'community leaders' that others call 'gangs'; cassava flour is becoming accepted as an alternative to flour and there are calls of corruption all over the place.
Perhaps it's time to start speaking patois again. Maybe that's the problem with the government in this country... they're just not speaking the same language as the people around them.
Or maybe people who don't have water should be patient for a few more decades...
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