Stand firm, reject crime

Estrada, who was born in Laventille and migrated to the United States as a teenager, was delivering a motivational talk during a meeting with children and their parents from the Each One Teach One pre-school at the Beetham Community Centre. It was one of a series of visits and talks he will deliver in the Laventille and Belmont areas over the upcoming month.

He said it was important to have moral courage because this is what was necessary for someone to resist the pressure to make easy money quickly. “I admire people with moral courage. I had to have moral courage, I Iost friends along the way because I wouldn’t do the drugs, I wouldn’t go to steal, I wouldn’t do those things,” Ambassador Estrada said. He added there is a lot of pressure on young people to do the wrong things and it called for moral courage to stand up against that pressure.

He said the students of the Each One Teach One pre-school would have to face that pressure and deal with it, including the pressure to make easy money.

“Why go dig a ditch or go work as a waiter when you could sell drugs and make a lot of money real quick? I was exposed to some of those things and I refused to do it. So make the right choices. If I did not make the right choices, I would not be where I am today.” The Ambassador said it was his first visit to the Beetham since his arrival in Trinidad to take up his ambassadorial duties and he had been looking forward to the visit for “quite some time” and planned to visit as much of the country as possible before his time was up.

Estrada said visiting such areas as the Beetham, Laventille, Sea Lots and other “challenged” areas “is where my heart is really at.” He said the pre-schoolers in the audience were the country’s future.

He said many good things happened to him in the US but the foundation was laid in Trinidad.

He said Trinidad and Tobago was a very innocent place when he left to go to the U.S. but it was a time of great turmoil over there and he faced civil rights and drug issues.

He said he also faced racism for the first time in his life. He said that in Trinidad he grew up without his father and lived with his mother who was a single parent raising four children.

Ambassador Estrada said there was a stepfather for a while and he saw his mother being beaten, an experience that could have easily made him into a man who beat women but instead it turned him into someone who disliked men who beat women. He said that in the U.S. he was exposed to drugs and saw a neighbour shot and killed, “but I did not let any of that influence me in any way into making the wrong choices. I had to decide, ‘I am not going to do the drugs, I am not going to sell the drugs, I am not going to get involved in crime’.” The ambassador said those were not easy decisions to make because his friends shunned him or wanted to beat him up because he would not go along with what they were doing. He said he decided to study instead. “I stayed in and read and read and read until I joined the US Marine Corps. He said that decision was the beginning of a journey which shaped him into the man he is today.

Ambassador Estrada said he was happy to be back in the land of his birth. “The welcome and the warmth of the people have been unbelievable, he said. “It has been an emotional journey for me and it’s also very humbling to be serving in a capacity as I am here in Trinidad and Tobago.” Also speaking at the event was the Parliamentary Representative for the area Fitzgerald Hinds and Simone de La Bastide, President of The Children’s Ark.

She said that she and others had been working with the Beetham Community since 1998 when she said she met Wayne Jordan, the organiser of Wednesday’s event.

She praised Jordan as a man who decided to “give back” to his community by educating and helping the youth, in the process earning respect, but not wealth, from inside and outside the community.