Forgotten Red Brick Village

IN the shadows of energy service companies, the village of Red Brick Trace exist in mangrove and thick bush in rural Otaheite. There is hardly drinking water for its residents who irk out an existence through fishing and tilling the soil.

Newsday visited the squatter community where young children are washed and cleaned with drain water meandering through the mangrove.

With scorching temperatures these days, a few children of Red Brick Trace Village have contracted rashes on their skin.

We found Seurjattie Balkaran, 17, bathing her two-year-old son, Daniel Sonny, in the murky drain water. Sonny’s thighs and buttocks are dotted with reddish bumps.

“We have no choice but to live like this because there is no water and nobody seems to care,” Balkaran said.

The rash broke out on the child’s skin just before the Easter holidays, she said. There are other children like Sonny with discoloured skin, perhaps due to constant bathing with water from the mangrove.

Fisherman Rooplal Partap said the community lacks basic infrastructure. A mud trace leads to several two-bedroom shacks, each surrounded by mangrove, fruit trees and tall grass.

“I living here for the past two years and I had to use my own money to make this track for my vehicle to pass. It still not reaching my house. When the rain fall, I does have to park it right here and walk home,” Partap said.

Added to their woes, he said, is their exposure to criminals who feast on their boat engines, vehicles and fish catch. These have to be stored in a small unlit clearing where the pitch road ends and Red Brick Trace village begins.

“Over ten engines, each valued at $20,000 were stolen because fishermen couldn’t bring them home from the depot.”

Pointing to the waist-high grass on both sides of the mud track, villager Zorida Persad commented: “We feel forgotten in the back here because we have no water, no lights and no roads. We does have to burn our rubbish because the garbage truck refuse to come inside here.”

The residents said that their pleas to the Siparia Regional Corporation and parliamentary representative for the area Chandresh Sharma, seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.