All must help the poor

Over the past few years, and particularly the past few months, the Living Water Community (LWC) has seen a “great increase” in people seeking assistance. Co-foundress of the LWC, Rhonda Maingot said: “We have families with two, three, four, five people in homes and no-one working. We have many more people on the breadline and every day, every day people are coming to us, in our centres especially in Port of Spain and in San Fernando”.

On the Budget, Maingot said the government has said it was a “people’s budget” and she looked forward to the education grants to assist poor families. In the Budget Statement, Finance Minister Davendranath Tancoo said the government had put students first through provision of 20,000 book grants before the start of the new academic term. The $1,000 school supplies and book grant is intended to support financially disadvantaged primary and secondary students.

Maingot said, “We have so many children not going to school because they can’t afford shoes, they can’t afford books, they can’t afford uniforms…even in our hundreds of people that come to us, many of the families are like that,” she stated.

Maingot underscored that everyone should show care for the poor on the fringes of society. “Everyone who lives in Trinidad and Tobago, who has means to live comfortably or in some particular way, you have a home, you have a job. It is hard to make ends meet but you can. We owe it to the poor to help them, not only the government must help…”

Maingot believes there is desperation in the poor and people need to be sensitive to what is going on around them. Referring to the adage that a hungry man is an angry man, she cautioned, “We need to be careful not to let poverty destroy us. When we are looking somewhere else and not looking at the poor…we are not seeing and understanding and experiencing their pain. That’s a very dangerous thing”.

She added: “All of us need to look at this, our government and all the people in Trinidad and Tobago. We need to see the plight of the poor at this time, it’s not good, it’s not healthy, it’s not good for our country, for any of us”