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.