Remember our Caribbean resilience

The grim outlook on life in Trinidad and Tobago was superseded for a few days by the spectacular Olympic performance of Caribbean athletes from islands normally devastated by storms and hurricanes—Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, and Jamaica.

But we are back to the day-to-day grime—traffic congestion, unemployment, the rising cost of living, home invasions and murders. We live in fear in our once safe communities with the expectation that any one of our friends or family members could be gunned down, making them another front-page story.

The thick cloud of darkness has affected many and national development too, since crime is causing a brain drain.

Other countries are now benefitting from an education we paid for. Well-to-do parents are also encouraging their children to look to the North and forget about “Trinidad is nice, Trinidad is a paradise.”

We cannot all leave; most of us will stay anyway. How can we be helped then in this present time; how can we hope when far too many things seem hopeless? We must keep our eyes focused on where the light is. That light is our collective memory, our Caribbean historical resilience.

We dare not give up.

This is not our darkest hour. Slavery and indentureship were much worse. We bear in us genes of resilience. We have come through cruelty and poverty of untold proportions, but our ancestors saw beyond what was, to what could be. One anchor they had was their faith—Hinduism, Islam, African and First Peoples religions, and Christianity.

Today’s first reading speaks of this anchor: “Now Israel, take notice of the laws and customs that I teach you today, and observe them, that you may have life and may enter and take possession of the land that the Lord the God of your fathers is giving you.”

We cannot wait. We must reclaim our faith as the bedrock of family life and community relations.

Is poverty really as insurmountable as we think? The words ‘neighbour’ or ‘neighbs’ still has a familiar ring. It is rooted in a faith which calls us to solidarity and to bind together in difficult times, giving each other hope by sharing resources and love.

Faith also inspired us to live the highest values and attend to education. Our education results are worrying as we see fewer and fewer full CSEC/CAPE passes from 2020 to 2024.

Education is in need of serious repair for we believe every child can learn. He/she just needs the right motivation from home and the right key to unlock their cognitive potential.

Our faith-inspired values are being stifled by materialism across all sectors, private and public: “These people honour me only with lip service, while their hearts are far from me.” This is especially so of people who are in a position to make real change but who shy away from doing so because that would involve loss of income, status, and friends.

This makes our present situation more onerous. Our response must be a mixture of created hope and eschatological hope. We create hope by creating opportunities through myriad forms of social engagement, active involvement in consultation and cooperation with State bodies and private organisations. But when that too isn’t enough, we must remember our hope in Christ.

We cannot see what we hope for or how it will come but come it will. That is our faith. It is with this faith we celebrate our 62nd anniversary of Independence and believe God will do in His own time what we long for at present.