Nowhere to run or hide

At approximately 7.30 pm on Sunday night, the driver of the Ian Ramdeen backhoe dropped the “tray” of his huge piece of equipment onto the ground right in front of my newly erected front wall.

The resulting thud made my wall, gate and house tremble. He then looked over at me and laughed triumphantly as if to say, “There, I can do what I want. “The authorities have given me carte blanche.” However, instead he shouted, “That’s how you drive a backhoe,” before he laughed again and drove off, back onto St Lucien Road to continue digging up  the road. It was then that I realised that I was a woman under siege. Not only was I trapped in Sunset Gardens because the entire exit of the street was excavated, but now I was being intimidated. And this pressure was all because my lawyers were suing Ramdeen and his boss, developer Gowkaran Mahabir. All because I was standing up for my rights instead of lying down and letting these men and their backhoes, bulldozers and trucks roll over my house and me. How brave of this driver! A man in a big machine, threatening a lone woman on a road on a Sunday night, driving back and forth across Sunset Gardens, each time getting closer to my wall, close to the overhead wires, laughing at my consternation. Not even the shouts of his co-workers to “get out the people road” and to “watch the wires” could stop the macho, crazy fool. Why should he cease his madness? Who was I but a stupid taxpayer that did not have a quarter of the influence of his boss Ramdeen or of Mahabir? I was nothing compared to these two big boys who had been able to convince the police to let them inconvenience thousands of residents of Diego Martin for two days by completely blocking off a major access road to their homes.

Ramdeen’s driver could do what he wanted as my newly built front wall and recently installed electronic gate shook and quaked, and my house shuddered. There was no one to stop him. Not the EMA, not the Diego Martin MPs, not Town and Country, not the Regional Corporation. Certainly not the police. For standing right there, in front of the very sign, which said, “Sunset Gardens, Private Road,” while Ramdeen’s driver ran roughshod, was a policeman who refused to uphold the law. Instead, he chose to threaten me. His attitude though, should really have been of little surprise. I had been threatened a few months ago by another police constable when I appealed with him to stop Ramdeen’s trucks and backhoes from entering the road and parking in front of my house. These constables were quick to quote the law, which every time, seemed to favour Ramdeen and Mahabir. Even today, another constable told me — after yet another complaint about trucks blocking my exit by parking in front of my house on Sunset Gardens — that I must erect a barrier and hire a security guard or the road is not private. Alter-natively, he advised me to go to West End with “papers” proving Sunset Gardens is a private road. Never mind that the street’s residents earlier this year, put a notice in Newsday, advising the public that Sunset Gardens was a private road and would be closed for 12 hours. Never mind that a copy of that notice was dropped off at West End. I still could not get this “man of the law” to believe that he was on a private road. I had also written to the Minister of National Security, to the Commissioner of Police on this matter. Little has changed.

I am most certainly a woman under siege. The worst part of this captivity is that it is for the most part, a sentence of solitary confinement. I say solitary because for months, though everyone around me has complained about Gowkaran Mahabir’s Vale View million-dollar development, that is all that they have done, complained. Talk, talk and more ole talk. However, they have refused to put their names to paper, sign a petition, and appeal to the EMA, Town and Country, to the Diego Martin Corporation, to anyone. All save one Vale View couple — the Mitchells — and me. Furthermore, to obey the law, I was learning, was to be “unTrini.” Or, as one driver put it, “Why all yuh people so difficult?” even as his heavy equipment threatened to destroy the road that the residents of Sunset Gardens pay to surface. I wanted to ask him who he meant by “you people,” but I knew he was referring to citizens who had respect for law and order, a species on the brink of extinction in this country. In his view, I should fold my arms and take all that was being done to me, be trapped in my house, have backhoes against and on my property. I wondered if someone had gone to his home and pulled a construction stunt such as this whether he would take this crap. Would he want truck drivers cursing his mother, daughters, and sisters? I doubted it.

For months, I had been writing and fighting, trying to get justice, to get the authorities to do the right thing. I had seen Mahabir’s EMA Certificate to build million-dollar town houses and in my view, it did not permit backhoes to enter private roads, park on people’s sidewalk lawns, scrape their walls, pound the road outside their houses, shaking the very foundations of these. Nor for that matter did it permit him to close down an entire borough for a weekend, to prevent people from being able to drive into their streets, cause traffic jams, or did it say he could use heavy machinery until midnight as he did on Sunday night. It definitely did not contain a clause, which permitted women residents to be intimidated. During this struggle with Ramdeen and Mahabir, I had been called everything from a mad woman to worse. Yesterday morning a phone call came to Newsday, the man at the end, chicken enough to threaten two female journalists — Nalinee Seelal and me — saying that “they would deal with us” for writing about Vale View. I am now publicly making the Commissioner of Police and Minister of National Security aware of these threats. I am also calling on all the “relevant authorities” to visit Vale View and that includes the 2020 vision MPs for Diego Martin, who were nowhere in sight this weekend as their constituents suffered, as my walls shook and as workmen intimidated and cursed me. What are you waiting on to act? A major environmental or traffic disaster in Diego Martin? Or worse? Much worse? Once a man in a backhoe is pounding the pavement at the side of a woman’s house late at night while another is simultaneously threatening her front wall with another, and no one is doing anything to stop them, there is really nowhere for her to run or hide.