This week we attended the funeral of Ezekiel Paglia, who was shot and killed while riding his bicycle in the village. It was tragic. His dreams and his mother’s hopes were shattered by random gunfire on the highway.
But have you ever thought for a moment about the 15-year-old young woman who was sitting in a car that was peppered with bullets by the same assailant?
She survived, or so I would like to think. Nothing is said about her and what she will have to go through. Her life is currently such that she is in hiding and hoping to defeat the gunman who came after her father, who is reported to be 39 years old.
Can I think about this for a moment? Will my daughter, who will be a junior high school student, not be able to move freely? At 37 years old, you’re under threat of death?
How did the father get into this space? The sad part is that the men who shot him may have attended the same school as him. Where will it end?
Let us not believe that the indiscriminate shooting of Ezekiel was unprecedented. it’s not.
Remember when Success Laventille Secondary School students De Nielson-Smith and Mark Richards were murdered within an hour of leaving school?
Gunmen took them out of their cars and mockingly murdered them. That was in late January 2016.
But remember on New Year’s Day that year, a 6-year-old child, Jodelle Ramnath, and a 69-year-old woman, Alvina Warner, were shot and killed in a fireworks explosion?
What about the need to close Our Lady of Laventille Roman Catholic Elementary School because men with guns are running around the school grounds every day?
Photo: Ministry of National Security
A similar incident occurred at Rosehill RC Primary School, where residents were forced to say that the gang had exceeded the standards of “decency” and “lost all reason and began committing brutal acts.”6 That was a year ago.
All these murders remain unsolved. The case dates back to May 2014, when 9-year-old Jadel Holder and his brother, 15-year-old Jamal Brathwaite, were murdered in their home.
According to newspaper reports, their mothers were also present. She worked Sunday to Sunday at a supermarket along the Eastern Highway to support her children. While she was doing her job, the boys began to get scared. Death has come to them.
Wasn’t she a good mother? How do we judge that?
What about Netanya Mohamdali? do you remember her? I don’t think she is.
Her mother fought and stood by her side after she was raped by a 24-year-old man in 2015 when she was 12 years old. Her court system failed her, but she still got her CXC pass. She was then murdered and left in a ravine.
What more can a mother do? Poverty is hell even if you live in the central region.
Her hands and feet were bound with rope and her head was hit, and an autopsy determined that she died from a cut to her neck. she was 17 years old.
What will be our reaction? Some of us instinctively politicize the issue of dying young people.It’s easy wash your hands approach. Vote for us and things will change.
Some may accuse the person who was killed of committing some immoral act, and justice has been served. Some accuse the community of harboring criminals.
A popular opinion might be that it’s not our fault that crime is happening in places that are high. All we need is labor from nearby areas. Please don’t hold us responsible for the illnesses that are currently occurring.
But let’s realize that if a country becomes ungovernable or we destroy a place, it affects everyone. The whole ship will sink. There is no partially submerged ship if the bow is out of the water. It’s nothing after all.
What Wendell Manwallen said about Joubert’s death is true. We made a choice and now we have to deal with the consequences.
When you focus on yourself and your elitist position, you rob yourself and your country. Your greed is not beneficial to you. Jamaica’s business class learned that hard lesson.
They fly to Fort Lauderdale and other parts of Miami and return to Kingston. Now they want to start a business here. What a life!
We choose not to act as if the boys of Laventille (and other poor communities) matter, while visibly demonstrating what is valuable in society. We commercialized everything we could. We cut off everyone who can’t protect themselves. We live in a time of profound moral failure.
Who will care to heal the wounds that endlessly fester due to the bitterness that characterizes our political discourse and the bile of division that stains our interactions?
(via CNC3)
People in East Port of Spain and other poor areas don’t have the resources to move policy makers. Since Makandar Daaga, no clear spokesperson for their cause has emerged. We don’t have writers to ask the right questions.
Instead, there is a charlatan who is unapologetically burdened with a glamorous lifestyle. They are milking the pride of the community for their selfish purposes. They boast with loud words like clouds and winds that bring no rain.
What are the conditions that characterize this quagmire? Children in Laventille and other economically disadvantaged areas are growing up in severe poverty, without enough income to meet their food, clothing, and shelter needs.
(Copyright Johanne Rahaman, from phmuseum.com)
They are poor not because they chose to be poor, but because they were born into families with no money. Unless we buy into the myth that gangs provide a good life, we can’t change this.
Perhaps they suffer from poor health caused by poor living conditions. They are developmentally disabled and have learning disabilities. But their schools don’t have the resources to overcome these hurdles.
Mental health issues plague these children. They can go from being aggressive and fighting to being withdrawn and depressed.
Many people are starving and suffering from malnutrition (even in Trinidad and Tobago!). How do we expect them to do well in the classroom? How do we expect them to love us back? Or someone?
We have failed them. What kind of work can they do? Are we perpetuating the problem?
They become the immediate force of the gang. Ruthless and heartless. We are now witnessing the transformation of gang business into a deadly strangulation of the country’s business sector by extortionists.
(Copyright We Heart)
Reports of threats are also increasing. How can this be managed when trust in the police is low?
In April 2023, seven police officers were indicted on charges of misconduct in office and perverting the course of justice over an alleged extortion incident in Sangre Grande. This is good (TTPS acted), but how many others are doing the same? Unanswered question.
The story of Jamaican Donald “Zeeks” Phipps is instructive.
There, successive governments refused to invest in development, allowing control of communities in urban centers. Failure to invest in education, training and job creation has created a vacuum.
As government revenues declined, the power of “Zeeks” as providers to the community increased. How was this reserve financed? Extortion by Jamaican dons was an important source of income. (Charles, 2002)
what are we waiting for?
