Count your blessings!

I ONCE had the very interesting task of showing a London-based Jamaican businessman around Port-of-Spain on a two-week mission to see if his expanding enterprise could be successful in Trinidad. During the day we drove to various parts of Trinidad, particularly offices in downtown Port-of-Spain. After the first few days of gallivanting around town, the businessman turned to me and said, “Wow… you know, Port-of-Spain is so clean!” “Port-of-Spain clean? You’ve got to be kidding,” I said to him, as we drove past a vagrant ripping open a bag of garbage on the side of the road. For someone to remark that our smelly little city was clean had to have seen it really bad. So I asked him what it was like in Jamaica. He told me that in Kingston there are mounds of garbage on the roadside for weeks, that there are crumbling buildings everywhere, that there is extreme poverty in the capital city, and that in comparison Port-of-Spain is spotless. He said to me, “You should count your blessings; you don’t know what other people live like!”

Indeed, how many of us feel blessed to be living in Trinidad and not somewhere else? Every time you open a local paper it seems like there is nothing but bad news – rape, murder, kidnapping, violence, schools on the brink of collapse, no water, no electricity, car accidents, teenage pregnancy, AIDS, and so on and so on. But are we as a country really suffering all that badly? Should we always feel so sorry for ourselves? Should we always dwell on our problems instead of looking at our small blessings? Should we all be talking about migrating to greener pastures? Why do we always forget that no matter how bad we may think it is here in sweet, sweet T-and-T, it is worse somewhere else in the Caribbean and in the world, and that maybe we really don’t have it so bad after all?

My theory is that because nothing bad ever really happens to us, we take our relative comfort and stability for granted and get into the habit of perpetual complaining. Here we sit, resting comfortably on the waistline of the equator, while natural disasters and social catastrophes seem to pass us by. When hurricanes are thrashing other islands to pieces, the brunt of the storm always sashays its way right past us, giving us a little taste of flash flooding now and then. We never open the paper and see “60 dead  in floods”. We never see pictures of entire villages submerged in floodwater with families sitting on their roofs waiting for help. We take for granted the fact that Trinidad, for some reason, is usually spared major tragedies! To help us remember to count our blessings, take a look at some of these snapshots from around the world that may help us realise that we should be extremely grateful that we call Trinidad home:

IRAN:  In December 2003, a massive earthquake shook North Eastern Iran, killing over 15,000 people – but in 1990, an even larger one hit, claiming the lives of 35,000. Try to imagine 35,000 Trinis being killed in an earthquake! 

MONTSERRAT: In 1997, the Mount Soufriere volcano erupted, forcing 8,000 people to seek refuge in neighbouring islands as lava and ash covered sections of the small island. We should be grateful the only volcanic eruption we’ve ever suffered is from the rare mud volcano eruptions! 

VENEZUELA: In our neighbour to the south, the longest oil strike in the nation’s history put daily life on hold for months as people stood up every day to try and buy some fuel. The worst we ever suffer is when someone spreads a rumour that NP is going to strike and everyone heads to the gas stations in a frenzy, causing bumper to bumper traffic!  

BRAZIL: In 2002, a massive mudslide hit Brazil and killed 36 people in a seaside resort, after experiencing over two months’ rain in one night. Could you imagine buying a Newsday one day and the front page reads “40 dead at Store Bay”?

IRAQ: A country at war with innocent Iraqis caught in the middle. Baghdad destroyed, thousands dead and injured, heart-wrenching pictures of little children missing an arm, crying in a hospital bed. What do we know about war? Nothing.

INDIA: Right now in India floods from this year’s monsoons push the death toll close to the thousands. We get a little taste of flooding now and then, but the worst that will happen is the inside of your car will get wet! 

AFRICA: Don’t even talk about suffering in Africa. Where to begin? Starvation, AIDS, disease, death, ethnic cleansing, genocide, tribal war, Hutus murdering hundreds of thousands of Tutsis, it’s too depressing to even think about. But Panday has the nerve to use the term “ethnic cleansing” in Trinidad. Give me a break!

Okay so you get the picture. There is so much trouble in the world! There are millions of people dying every day, people suffering and living in a type of poverty and hopelessness that we will never understand. Yet we never read the news and think how lucky we are to live in a peaceful and content country. Our main problem is the rising murder rate, which is a problem all countries must deal with. So before you open your mouth to bad talk whatever it is you don’t like about Trinidad – the potholes in the road, that you lost electricity while you were surfing the Internet, that one lime costs $1 at the supermarket – think about how lucky we are that we have roads, that we have transport, that we have electricity, that we have rivers with running water and trees growing fruit. We have many, many things to be grateful for, so remember that no matter how bad you think you may have it, there is someone out there who has it ten times worse than you!