Memories of underdevelopment

I was a child but I wondered why our smart, new highway crossed the La Basse that puffed foul-smelling clouds from the continuous incineration near the road. Endless flocks of macabre-looking corbeaux lined the highway, sometimes huddled over some special mass of garbage, while others shrouded the surrounding swampy vegetation. It was not pleasant, and so I wondered even more at why people had chosen to live right opposite all that filth in tin and board huts.

Of course, I eventually learned about how poverty happens and how people manage to survive against the most daunting odds, doing whatever it takes. Later, the garbage site retreated a bit and the slum dwellers got half-decent housing, but that was my first exposure to rank urban poverty.

Laventille, where we went annually doing the Stations of the Cross up to Mt Calvary, was poor but it didn’t resemble the Beetham Highway. What we saw as we frequently travelled east and south from PoS — the rows of little tapia houses, yoked oxen in the rice paddies whipped by bare-footed, half-naked men, children carrying buckets of water on their heads, the queues at trickling standpipes — appeared more benign and are not so evident now, but it would be a mistake to believe we’ve seen off rural poverty.

When the Lady Young Road was finally opened, in about 1960, it presented a sharp contrast to everything below.

The new, elegant roadway, winding its way above the city, affording spectacular views, made us feel big-up. We had our own big Z bend. You needed a car with good brakes and to be a good driver to negotiate it. For decades no one seemed to live up there. Lady Young maintained her lofty air and high-level state of repair, until the last few years. Now she’s beginning to slip, like a loose woman, as the urban squatters migrate to the northern hills she finds her way through.

I’ve been noting with gloom the growing number of makeshift driveways coming off the road, the massing black bags of rubbish, the shabby shacks sitting just off the verges, and more alarmingly, the number of cars parked on the shoulder, the increasing number of people who stand there trying to get a ride, dogs straying between them and the on-coming traffic. It is obvious that these new residents are by and large squatters and are occupying these lands illegally.

But why are they being allowed to do so when they pose a danger to themselves, their children and those using the road?

It is not safe to have vehicles pulling in or out of the poorly constructed access roads – a car with no headlights on appeared, unannounced, in front of me the other night — nor to have pedestrians, children and stray pets crossing near blind corners on what, to all intents and purposes, is a highway. And apart from the apparent perils people face there, what services do they receive? Is there official rubbish collection? What about schools, electricity, gas, water supply and telephone connection?

I was away for a while recently and on my return was surprised that the burgeoning illegal vending stalls, between the Barataria crossing of the Eastern Main Road and the Morvant village, that were becoming a feature of the lower end of the Lady Young Road, had been demolished. But why did those bother the authorities, and not what’s going on further up the hill? I guess the answer is something to do with the different statutes governing squatters and hawkers.

Frankly, what concerns me is where we are going as a nation. Of all the development models we could have followed, sadly we seem to have chosen the typical Latin American model – stinking rich and miserable poor.

And our landscape will soon completely epitomise it: gated communities; high walls to keep the hoards out; an imposing commercial capital on the coast, fringed above by a sea of ramshackle hovels waiting to slide down the hill in pools of mud, like they frequently do all over Latin America when their own weight becomes unbearable for the eroded earth.

The illegal residents of Lady Young Road should be re-housed in a proper fashion and the road made safe again. If there is no will to do that then those people should be given proper services, their land occupation formalised and advice given on how to build safely.

They will need pedestrian crossings, bus and taxi stands and emergency and utility services.

But I would bet that there is no will for that either, so soon both our highways into the expensive and sprawling 21st century PoS will take us through the lasting and ugly evidence of our persistent underdevelopment.