Support for social programmes in Laventille

THE EDITOR: Please permit me a space in your newspaper to reply to a letter published in my name by your newspaper. See issue Tuesday October 28, 2003 page 11 under the heading “Fundamental flaws of funding.” The letter was highly critical of Government’s Social Development programmes. It went further to state that all social development programmes in the Laventille area were failures. This is a position that I have great difficulty to agree with. Laventille has an exceptionally high percentage of people who are not employably attractive. In the past, social programmes were designed to assist them in providing food for the table. This approach was used to prevent the rupture of family life and its eventual dire consequences. It was never intended to become a means to an end. The Government is now concentrating on making these communities susceptible to the influences of the business and labour market ie training and information. This is where the new social development thrust is taking aim. Environmental programmes such as CEPEP and the Civilian Conservation Corps plus YTTEP and NEDCO were designed to change the outlook of the youth, budding business enthusiasts and the unskilled, showing them how they should tackle the challenges of the changing work and business environment, particularly those outside the traditional business culture.

A good example is the new technical school that is being built on the site of the old Rum Bond and the hefty sum allocated for social development in the present Budget. Some of our more recognised non-governmental organisations such as St Vincent de Paul, Living Waters Community, Salvation Army, CREDO Centre, Care and Respect for Youth (CRY) and the Fernandes Foundation, who have over the years kept the wolf of social disaster at bay, cannot and must not be considered as failures. For example we no longer see people dying from AIDS on the streets, St Vincent de Paul picks them up and provides them with hospice facilities. Space does not permit us to elaborate on the vast amount of social work undertaken by those of us who are socially conscious. To imply even in the subtlest manner, that funds allotted to these social organisations can be considered to be misplaced, is to suggest that past funds given to Mr Smith’s Morvant Laventille Improvement Organisation should be considered a social error. We know quite a few young people who have benefitted from MLIO  past training programmes. SEPOS Cultural Workshop has in the past made a small but not insignificant contribution in helping people of a particular ilk (that is to say mothers whose partners are drug-dependent) by supplying them with basic food stuff etc. These people belong to a particular niche, they are proud and would not beg. Our contribution was to ensure that they receive assistance with the maximum amount of discretion.

This programme has now been whittled down to a mere fraction to what it once was. What little remains of the programme is due to the generosity of The Living Waters Community and to a lesser extent the African Association of Trinidad and Tobago. We have even lost our halfway house to people with political influence. But as Christians we are not permitted to hold grudges or indulge in spite, the work must go on. We hope that whoever wrote the article “Fundamental flaws of funding” was not trying to draw our organisation into a political confrontation. Therefore, I must beg to differ from Mr Lennox Smith’s view that all social programmes in Laventille were failures. Mr Smith, above all persons, a community development consultant, who professes to have consulted from Trinidad to the Caribbean and North America should know that the problem is two fold; to prevent the horse from starving while the grass is growing and to provide an environment conducive for sustainable development. The whole exercise is a balancing act where money must be employed with an abundance of caution. We have not yet reached developed status; we are still a developing society desperately trying to lift our people out of the poverty trap. Perhaps, not enough was done in the past, perhaps we did not have the necessary funds to accomplish the mission, and if we have not succeeded in the time frame set by Mr Smith’s standards, it certainly was not from the want of trying. The uncompromising culture of Singapore is not an option for us, nor is the Trinidad and Tobago business community prepared to move their businesses to Singapore. We had a Singapore-oriented government and we voted them out of existence in 1991. Laventille is not an immutable society; people of talent have over the years been migrating at a rate faster than the society can produce them. To measure the success of Laventille without taking the demographics into consideration is to adopt a pedestrian approach on a four-lane highway.

MICHAEL MORGAN
Chairman of SEPOS Cultural Workshop