Children of the Storms

 (First published in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian on September 27, 2017)

On any regular weekday afternoon in Roseau, Dominica, you would see the children in school uniform pass. They hold each other’s hands to negotiate the slim footpaths while fretful adults follow nervously behind.

Around the same time, in the hilly villages out of town, the drivers slow to a crawl along frightfully narrow streets as students flow from their classrooms like the Layou River out to sea on a rainy day.

It is a new school term and school year. New texts and copybooks are stacked neatly away and fresh uniforms take proud places on the hangers.

Then, last week, a child looked up at the tall, shaken frame of the prime minister and asked: “Why did Jesus do this to us?”

Nobody has so far noticed, from among the hurriedly buried dead, any little ones. They are instead among the battered; many cowering beneath the tarpaulins or broken roofs and away from the mud now turned to dust along the streets outside.

In Barbuda, the first statistic was the two year old torn from the arms of his mother. In Sint Maarten it was little Oliver, pictured in the papers on the lap of his grandmother Melan “June” Salvary, who perished at the hands of Maria.

There is a “comforter” around Oliver’s neck. His plaited hair and crumpled shirt, evidence of a young child’s early days at school. Ms Salvary in her cap staring proudly at the camera.

Before Hurricane Maria, the Eastern Caribbean Office of UNICEF had launched a journalism project to record the conditions under which children in Hurricane Irma affected islands were made to live.

Through that project, came a photograph of five-year-old Tiquanisha Lewis and her little sister, two year old Tiquania, on a makeshift swing in Anguilla against the backdrop of their shattered neighbourhood and a blue ocean that seemed to merge with a cloudless sky.

The swing was among the few things left standing in the area. If the photographer had asked Tiquanisha to smile, she must not to have listened very carefully.

Eleven year old Giovanni is outside the gutted Adrian T. Hazell Primary School on the small British island colony. “As I saw the damage of the school I started to get sad because it may mean that I’m not going to see my friends or my teachers for a very long time “

Over in Antigua, prime minister Gaston Browne was addressing a gathering of Barbudans rescued from the carnage of their now deserted island. On the live online stream, you could see mothers with children on their laps. From time to time a baby would interject with a dreadful reminder.

These are the children of the storms. They ask if Jesus made the winds blow away from the other islands, “why did he do this to us?’

There appears no sound theology to answer the question. At some time or the other, we must have all considered the question through storms of different hues and come up with different answers when the priests and imams and pundits proved equally clueless.

Last week, a 13-year-old boy was raped in Guyana and thrown unconscious in the Berbice River to die. His body was found on Saturday. In T&T there are names we dare not forget: Sean Luke, Amy Emily Annamunthodo and latterly, Videsh Subar, among the many others.

There is, so often when considering these things, no punch line in our prose when we consider these victimised children, just that there sometimes appears to be great injustice in this world.

It does not appease me that all of this is someone’s or something’s “will” or that some greater logic now applies.

Today we have these children of the storms to ask the only real questions of our times. We need to listen to them, even if we do not know or understand the answers.

A handbook written and edited last by the ACM and CBU with support from UNICEF provides guidance on the coverage of children. Where is the journalism to cover this?

Culture, chaos, and noise

How many of you want to bet that by this same time next year, we would have had to recover from the harmful impacts of noise pollution from private and public, informal and official observances justified by reference to different components of what we describe as “de culture?”

In between, there will be the usual “zero tolerance” alerts from the police, politicians, and official agencies. The collateral damage of distressed babies (Kemani?), the aged, the ailing, animals (pets and wildlife), and our general state of humanity would have been slapped to their respective knees and, in most instances, made to stand again … for more.

On this issue, there is sad occasion to dispense with hope and to focus instead on mitigation and adaptation rather than on resolution and change. We are no longer lured by furious condemnation and spontaneous commitments to address this continued slur on our humanity.

All that’s needed are tiny chinks in the regulatory armour, the “culturally significant”, and “tradition” to extend advance pardon to purveyors of undisputed harm and injury.

Admit it. We all saw it coming … again.

At around 1.00 p.m. on Thursday October 16 in the vicinity of Lapeyrouse Cemetery along Tragarete Road in Port of Spain we heard an approaching “music truck” and noticed what we thought was an accompanying police escort on motorbikes.

The noise was thunderous and defiant of hands clasping embattled ears. The motorbikes officiously escorted the traveling cacophony through the traffic lights, ahead of other lunchtime traffic.

A funeral? Somebody’s birthday? A forthcoming political rally? We didn’t know. We could not make out the words through covered ears.

Had the country’s noise pollution rules been written differently and not granted free sheet to mobile sources, anyone in the vicinity could have felt entitled to rouse the EMA’s “environmental police” – whatever the other available, legally actionable avenues.

“But … I thought …” went my sister. Yes, I had also thought … Less than a week before a usually noisy Divali, there had to be hope - against considerable odds - that though promised legislation had yet to enter the public domain, firm action against such harmful practices expressed as a political “priority” would have at least been pre-emptively applied.

Following an election campaign that witnessed gratuitous employment of music trucks to attract public attention, the PM – deafened perhaps by her party’s own catchy choruses - had seemingly reached the end of her tether. Music trucks, she contended, were “a scourge” requiring specific legislative intervention.

Then there was the question of “fireworks” – that “public nuisance” widely recognised here for its well-established negative impacts on natural fauna and humans. Relatively muted Independence activities had promised much.

State of emergency conditions had also been inserted into the discussion. But we should have all been alert to the shenanigans. Yet, people sometimes live in hope – even when an SOE has been proven to be worthless for such a purpose … and others.

This space has been used so many times in the past to remind people that if we were to focus on what are the applicable laws, apart from our Noise Pollution Rules under the Environmental Management Act; there are the Explosives Act Chap 16:02, the Summary Offences Act Chap 11:02, and the Public Holiday and Festival Act Chap 19:05.

I have, however, also repeatedly advised that this subject is something that goes beyond what laws say and applies equally to what we as people consider to be behaviour appropriate to the requirements of civilised society.

Note, as well, a gradual muting of dissent resulting, I believe, from sheer hopelessness, and selective outrage on account of allegiances of all varieties.

Check the files and you will find occasions when different Cabinets committed to the records an intention to change things.

We have witnessed police commissioners who have spoken eloquently and knowledgeably. “Activists” who have spoken painfully. Victims who have displayed their wounds and losses.

Yes, there are other important things to occupy the public space. But in a sense this issue can be used to instruct the way we address the other challenges. For one, we can display a willingness to change our collective ways once clear benefits have been established.

We can also learn that our acceptance of noise is a symptom of our tolerance for disorder. A society that accepts noise without restraint also risks accepting other forms of public harm with impunity.

There is also a lesson related to the exercise of disciplined restraint to take us to a place where we distinguish between culture and chaos and can intervene humanely at times when harm appears imminent.

 

Unhealed Caribbean wounds

The year was 1999 and then prime minister Keith Mitchell was coasting to a memorable 15-0 victory at the polls in Grenada. The campaigning was intense.

Fabian Horsford, 18, was with his father and the family cattle in a rural pasture in Petit Calivigny.

Suddenly, off ran one cow … and Fabian … toward some bushes, with Dad trailing exhaustingly behind.

Some distance away, just as Fabian was on the verge of declaring a winning race, there was an explosion. The youngster fell in the bushy overgrowth bleeding and in pain. He subsequently died - a victim of previously unexploded munitions from the events of 1983.

I was in Grenada at the time and wrote the story. The IPS headline was: “The Invasion that Will Not Go Away.” The fields of past battles, you see, aren’t easily cleared.

As the country observed a rainy Heroes Day – 42 years since the October 19 slaughter of Maurice Bishop and members of his People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG), and the subsequent US invasion of the island – I could not get Fabian out of my mind.

As the headline in 1999 suggested, history has a way of lingering. It also has a way of influencing the senses and emotions. Wounds stick around much longer than we care to believe.

That boy, you see, represented the most vulnerable of the vulnerable – victimised by the decision-making of the powerful … near and far.

It had been no metaphorical overreach to conclude then, as I do now, that Fabian’s demise signified the durable, tragic impacts not only of the 1983 violence, but of the circumstances set in train in 1979.

Many who participated in the revolution now acknowledge fatal errors and those who have stopped romanticising about what occurred may now regret several things – engaging the Cold War trap included.

Amidst the rubble of collateral damage of the era were strained Caricom relations – 10 years into the process and younger than Fabian. Though Grenada remained active within the grouping, things were not about to immediately return to the heady days of 1973 and the fresh signatures on the Treaty of Chaguaramas or when Grenada itself came on board in 1974.

The PRG years remained, arguably, the most challenging period in the history of Caricom. Yes, Bishop hosted the July 1979 Summit and missed just one such meeting, but the murmurings and divisions were pronounced, and the country was about to become increasingly estranged from an already unsteady grouping over those four years.

When the 1983 assassinations and subsequent US invasion (Operation Urgent Fury) occurred, T&T, Guyana, and Belize – at that time (and now ironically) citing “international law” - set an effective distance from those who had unreservedly endorsed the “intervention” (one contentious descriptor).

Immediately after, T&T imposed a visa restriction on Grenadians entering the country out of fear that surviving militants could enter and stir up some of the trouble T&T had sought to avoid.

Up to that time, there had been nothing to prepare the regional grouping for what had transpired barely a decade since its inauguration.

Since then, there have been good reasons to be concerned that the claws of geo-politics would re-enter the fray more visibly to test regional foundations.

As with other integration movements, there has since been an extensive list of challenges, highlighted most recently by the situation in Venezuela but including a solution to Haiti, several skirmishes linked to free market conditions, and occasional scuffles over international candidatures.

Sadly, T&T’s independent posturing and decision-making in international relations, which held firm in 1983, is now marked by unconditional sycophantic support for actions widely declared to be in clear breach of international law and due process when addressing alleged criminal behaviour.

Alignments reminiscent of the events of 1983 - with T&T representing a significant shift in independent posture together with Guyana and others (wait on Grenada) - are emerging to once again test the sturdiness of Caricom’s solidarity doctrine.

If you do not pull all of this together, it would be difficult to come to terms with last Friday’s terse communique on the “security build up in the region” and which included a note that T&T had “reserved its position.”

The statement virtually takes us back to the heady years of Grenada’s revolution and the deep discomfort of (largely) polite discord. But there are potentially deadly consequences.

We may well find in the coming years scattered, unexploded munitions awaiting the arrival of more Fabians if we aren’t careful.

Media and disasters

My submission deadline and other responsibilities ensured that today’s contribution to the T&T Guardian could not sensibly address some of the more compelling headline news of the day, the national budget included. But it provides an opportunity to draw attention to last Monday’s (not totally unrelated) global observance of International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction.

It was an occasion notably absent from public attention here in T&T and, indeed, most of the Caribbean – understandably distracted as we are with other matters which, in a sense, all resonate rationally when it comes to issues of survival.

But a failure to occupy even minimal space on social and mainstream media platforms appeared to betray a sense of invincibility and distraction, even in the face of a history of destruction and painful recovery.

The UN system, through its Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR), has warned it is advisable that the world fund resilience instead of waiting to pay for the effects of disasters later. Extend that thought to investing in domestic resilience measures instead of picking up the pieces after disaster strikes.

It has been observed that damaging naturally occurring events, globally, are becoming “more frequent, more costly, and more devastating” at a cost of up to US$202 billion annually. The Caribbean estimates, per capita, can be expected to be far more dramatic.

Meanwhile, our annual encounter with the acute perils of the hurricane season, storms and floods, occasional experiences with risks associated with earthquakes, and periodic volcanic episodes should all inspire greater urgency when addressing possible mitigative measures.

Sailboats in Grenada
Hurricane Ivan, 2004 (Photo: Wesley Gibbings)

Importantly (and this is what occupied my Monday morning) there is a need for much more attention to the dissemination of information on disaster risks and perils, and examination of the role journalists and media can, and often do, play before, during, and after such turmoil.

This was the subject of a discussion led by the Media Institute of the Caribbean (MIC) and UNSECO following publication of landmark journalistic case studies included in: “Disasters and Crises in the Caribbean Region: A Review of Experiences in Seven Countries.”

For the occasion, the MIC asked regional media workers what they thought about the relationship between media and their societies when it came to disasters and crises. I thought it instructive to reflect on some responses here:

“My research has once again showed me the important role of the media in disaster preparedness and recovery. We act as a bridge to help stakeholders reach each other and we are sometimes the most relatable voices in such trying circumstances” - Elesha George (Dominica).

“As media and communication practitioners, our role during a crisis is essential. We must consistently deliver accurate and clear information; it's sometimes the difference between life and death” - Esther Jones (Barbados).

“Journalists are among the first on the scene following a natural or manmade disaster and these first reports set the tone for immediate response and recovery. Our work should never be underestimated as we don't only highlight issues and challenges but participate in the journey of preventative measures to building resilience when it comes to risk reduction” - Linda Straker (Grenada).

“What has stood out most to me is the importance of community during disasters and recovery. Very often the real first responders are friends, family and neighbours, creating a support network that remains long after the event” - Carla Bridglal (Trinidad and Tobago).

“The media are expected to keep people informed, even as journalists are impacted by the hazards about which we report. Preparedness helps us to rise to the challenge” - Kenton Chance (St. Vincent and the Grenadines).

“Covering the devastation on our tiny island on Barbuda showed me that in a disaster, journalism is not just about reporting, it is about helping people make sense of chaos, find safety and hold on to hope” - Theresa T. Goodwin (Antigua and Barbuda).

“Preparedness saves lives. Awareness builds resilience. Our future and our storytelling depend on both” - Julian Rogers (MIC, Belize).

This kind of thoughtful feedback from Caribbean media professionals ought to stimulate action by disaster management agencies to bring journalists more into the information loop before, during, and after crises and emergencies.

Official agencies may well find in the media community trustworthy, loyal citizens who also have a vested interest in ensuring that critical threats to lives and livelihoods are as much their business as the experts charged with other critical aspects of disaster management.

The stakeholders have not always been successful in promoting the viability of such arrangements, and there have been sporadic attempts. But it’s absolutely worth a look.

 

Climate truth and transparency

Here’s hoping that this country will engage the COP30 process - being hosted this year in Belem, Brazil in November - as vigorously as we (mostly) have in previous years. 

There however appears to be advocacy against this in some quarters, particularly where long-established climate science is currently encountering tacitly coercive geo-political demands, anti-science, and sheer ignorance. 

Such postures have in their sights commitments to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) related to the slowing of global climate change and mitigation of its effects, and which are to form part of the Belem reporting agenda. 

NDCs are the product of the so-called, and politically troublesome, Paris Agreement adopted at COP21 in 2015. These undertakings help define the commitment of individual countries through “domestic mitigation measures” to address emissions and management of their potential impacts in individual states. 

There is the accompanying principle of “common and differentiated responsibilities” which makes distinctions between the obligations and capabilities of individual countries. There really is no carte blanche application of responsibilities.

 

Additionally, there is a requirement, within the Paris Agreement, to communicate the proposed actions to national populations. I am coming back to this. 

But first, it’s noteworthy that several countries, including T&T and others in the region, and within the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) grouping (which includes low-lying coastal regions) – notably Guyana – have already insisted that developmental priorities, seemingly in breach of general NDC commitments, may eventually create circumstances conducive to achievement of climate management goals. 

So, there is already an understanding by some countries, including T&T, that there are imperatives that cannot be skipped at the moment. It has become not a truly big deal to state this up front. There has been little timidity on this question. Witness Guyana’s open explanations and some of our own past political pronouncements. 

There is a lengthy narrative associated with this the genuinely interested can explore. It is nothing new and nothing fatal to the intent of the overall process. There is, meanwhile, little genuine debate, among a majority of respected scientists, over the fact of climate change and its causative factors. So, climate denial as a starting point is dismissible. 

Of course, there is also knowledgeable scepticism regarding the 1.5% target to take the world back to pre-industrial emission levels. But such a position does not undermine the essential thesis that much of what is being witnessed as climate events, results from human activity, is intensifying, and there are societal behaviours that can make a change.

 

So, back to the important communication dimension of NDC obligations. If anything, it serves as a complementary mechanism regarding the overall transparency of official action on matters way beyond the climate imperatives. This is why they have attracted the attention of everybody from educators to journalists to good governance advocates. 

There is already a directly stated national commitment through our Freedom of Information Act (however deficient and poorly implemented) and in our support as a nation for a variety of international instruments. 

These include the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). SDG 16:10, for instance, calls on governments to “ensure public access to information and protect fundamental freedoms, in accordance with national legislation and international agreements.” 

This is not specifically climate related, but there is wholesome relevance. There is no doubt that opacity in the conduct of public business presents us with one of the more significant obstacles to public awareness of and participation in the development process … including our experience with climate change. 

Where there is ill-informed state posturing, average, everyday people need to have at their command a cache of high-quality information to address this shortcoming. For instance, the notion of “environmental protection” finds worthwhile space when addressing the climate question but is not a central issue when considering national contributions to global emissions – which in the case of most SIDS are negligible and not significantly influential. 

What is even more pertinent and urgent is the manner in which the phenomenon, and approaches to address it, have had uneven impacts across developmental divides. The question of climate justice enters the discussion at this stage. 

Just as important is consideration of other components of the climate challenge related to issues of transparency and accountability. 

T&T’s tardiness with signing on to and implementing the 2018 Escazú Agreement, which focuses on a public right to access environmental information and to participate in environmental decision-making, deserves attention in this regard. 

The climate change/crisis challenge ought to be motivating much wider deliberations in the national communication eco-system – many of which may not initially resonate as climate related. But there is value in engaging the core issues of good governance and the manner in which civil society and individuals face up to the challenges of the modern era.

Revisiting Cheddi Jagan in 2025

If you were on the Caribbean beat as a journalist in the late 1980s/early 1990s, you would have recognised the late Guyanese leader, Dr Cheddi Jagan, as one of the more determined voices for a new global developmental paradigm, with this part of the world as a key focal point.

Prior to his ascent to office in 1992 – (again) since the story of Guyana 1961 is another remarkable issue – he was among the more ubiquitous Caribbean politicians; appearing almost anywhere there was a platform to air his concern that the developing world had not been receiving its fair share of global assets.

That much of it was dismissively put down to dated, dogged “socialism” belied key messages linked to notions of “social justice” as a phenomenon common to both sovereign countries within their own borders, and among members of the international community.

Those who had challenged the relevance of Jagan’s “New Global Human Order” back then were to quietly consume their words and negative thoughts by the time the UN system convened the First Copenhagen Summit on Social Development in 1995.

Colleague Caribbean journalists may also recall the year before, in Miami, at the First Summit of the Americas, News Centre tensions when someone from a US television network conducting business in an adjoining suite, interrupted a Jagan press conference (on this very issue) and rudely called for silence while the Guyanese leader was at the head table.

The spontaneous eruption of Caribbean media colleagues confirmed the fact that Dr Jagan - now a sitting President - through familiarity or sheer respect, had views considered to be worth more than passing attention. At that moment, his mission became lived, in-your-face reality.

Dr Cheddi Jagan

Some considered his advocacy in this area as being seminal in the formulation of a common Caribbean agenda in time for the Copenhagen Summit. In 2000, following Jagan’s death in 1997, a resolution entitled: “The Role of the United Nations in Promotion of a New Global Human Order” was tabled by Guyana before the United Nations General Assembly and adopted by consensus.

Thirty years after Copenhagen and 25 years since the Guyana resolution, the Second World Summit on Social Development is due for November 4 to 6 in Qatar.

An ILO study published in advance of the event strikes eerily reminiscent chords. Entitled: “The State of Social Justice: A Work in Progress”, the study dissects progress with some of the key aspirations identified in Copenhagen.

While acknowledging a world that “is wealthier, healthier and better educated than in 1995” there is also a concession that the benefits of such gains “have not been evenly shared, and progress in reducing inequality has stalled.”

In a sense, such an observation is fully in keeping with a view expressed by Dr Jagan all these years ago that mere attention to statistical indicators is insufficient to come to terms with realities on the ground.

At that time, there had been uneven attention in the Caribbean to the core issues. T&T was riding relatively high as a Caribbean energy superpower, while Guyana was in the throes of an overwhelming debt burden and heavily reliant on regional and other external support.

The proposed recalibration of regional and international priorities weighed more heavily on some and almost not at all on others. We, in T&T, appeared to be sitting pretty.

Jamaica was coming to terms with banking collapses and rising social disquiet. Barbados was confronting a balance of payments crisis and swallowing IMF remedies. Other neighbours were transitioning to situations of greater stability while others wobbled.

Dominica had been hit hard by Hurricane Luis in 1995, and extreme weather events everywhere were fast becoming the norm rather than the exception.

Today, the ILO observations can be levied on us right here in T&T. There is precious little space between current, growing socio-economic deprivation and past aspirations once deemed by us to be distant and near irrelevant.

Slowed economic growth, rising unemployment, a foreign earnings crisis, unstable social support resources, rising informality in the labour market, and general economic malaise all appear emergent.

Yes, there are worst-case scenarios to contemplate, but there is no law of history to establish complete invulnerability.

For reasons such as these, Qatar 2025 seems just as urgent for us in T&T as it was for Guyana et al in 1995. Jagan’s New Global Human Order confronts us once again. This time from a far more familiar vantage point.

 

Caricom stakes in Haiti

However urgent, tragic, and compelling, the deepening crisis in Haiti is unlikely to occupy considerable topline space at the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) which opened yesterday.

In fact, the agenda is so tightly packed that by the time the General Debate is over, global news agendas would have flooded us with innumerable, legitimate priorities covering unprecedented, vast terrain.

These include the Gaza genocide (however framed by discussants), related recognition of Palestinian statehood, wars involving Ukraine and Sudan, US actions regarding Venezuela, and general concern for the future of the UN itself after 80 years.

There is also the climate crisis, and our global engagement in shaping a collective Caribbean development greater than the sum of individual growth paths.

These prevailing and emergent issues all have direct relevance to our tiny Caribbean states. But there are others we dare not leave unattended - the question of Haiti included.

It is hoped, for instance, that UNGA contributions by Caricom Member States, in particular, will inform UN Security Council (UNSC) deliberations to follow, during which a future approach to the Haitian crisis will hopefully find consensus.

On Sunday, the UN Secretary General António Guterres, met with President of the Caricom-conceived Transitional Presidential Council (TPC) of Haiti, Anthony Franck Laurent Saint-Cyr.

They concluded that “urgent international action is needed to help restore security, including efforts to address gang violence, create conditions for the holding of credible, inclusive and participatory elections and mobilise greater humanitarian assistance.”

On Monday, Caricom led an international roundtable discussion on the margins of the UNGA on “Making the Case for Haiti.”

Both the US and Panama have meanwhile developed a UNSC resolution proposing the convening of a “Gang Suppression Force” comprising up to 5,500 personnel. It also calls for a UN support office providing logistical and operational assistance.

The backdrop to this is the October 2 expiration of the mandate of a Multinational Security Mission (MSS) established in 2023 and employs Kenyan troops. This occurred with 1,000 of a promised 2,500 troops – reduced because of funding deficits. Essential tools, such as helicopters, for instance, have also been absent.

In fact, the success of much of what is being proposed via the UNSC and proposed actions identified by the Organisation of American States (OAS) is highly contingent on financial investments to assure at least the basic needs of Haitian renewal.

The consequences of ongoing failure have been grave. Violent gangs have become more, rather than less, entrenched in key areas including the capital, Port-au-Prince. It has also not helped that the TPC has been a highly challenging mechanism.

Remarkably, there remains a view by some Haitian politicians that elections, if conducted in phases in some areas, can happen prior to the TPC’s agreed February 7, 2026, dissolution. The initial projection was for November elections. We shall see.

Caricom’s Eminent Persons Group (EPG) comprising former prime ministers Dr Kenny Anthony of Saint Lucia, Bruce Golding of Jamaica, and Perry Christie of The Bahamas, have not been sufficiently credited with engaging this intractable challenge.

The problem is that the two principal areas of immediate concern - violence and politics – persist alongside growing humanitarian crises. There is hunger, displacement, and a general sense of hopelessness in numerous quarters.

Around 90% of Port-au-Prince is currently under gang control; more than 5,600 people have been killed and there are over 1.3 million displaced person, 25% of whom are children.

Additionally. Close to five million Haitians face “acute food insecurity,” 60% lack clean water, and fewer than 25% of health facilities in critical areas function.

So, even if the violence subsides and there are elections - limited or not – there will remain issues of systemic deprivation with which the country would need to contend.

The OAS Roadmap offers a coherent, comprehensive prescription – albeit one contingent on heavy financial support. There are countries whose representatives will, even if fleetingly, raise the issue of Haiti over the coming days at the UNGA. They will have to put their money where their mouths have ventured.

As for us in T&T and the rest of the Caribbean, we need to more urgently consider the Haitian crisis to be a part of our own reality. In T&T we ignored the shenanigans of our troublesome neighbour to our west until its problems became ours. Our recent diplomatic missteps are clearly reflective of a misinformed, underdeveloped understanding of the issues and our place in all of this.

In fraternal states such as The Bahamas and Jamaica, there will be a fear that complacency on the part of the rest of us on the question of Haiti, can and will be at our collective peril.

Our performance at the UNGA ought to signal such a reality.