The million dollar question

THE MILLION-DOLLAR question I keep getting these days from friends and family abroad, is “Why are you still in Trinidad?” This is usually followed by, “What are you waiting for? To get kidnapped too? Why don’t you get out?” I suppose it is not their fault, since all they ever hear about is bad news from a country in chaos. And what horrifies them the most, living in their peaceful, quiet, anonymous suburbs in North America, is that in a small community like ours, everything happens a little too close to home. We all know way too many people who have been victims of crime – family members, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, so much that we have come to accept it as a fact of life. To them it seems like everything is happening in our own backyards, right in front of our eyes, and they simply can’t understand how we just keep on going about our merry little everyday lives. To them it is unimaginable.

I always thought you had to be one of those old fogeys to sit around and reminisce about the “good old days” but I find myself, at the ripe old age of 23, wondering how things could have changed so drastically for the worse in just a few short years. When I was 17 I played Jouvert for the first time with a female friend, and we walked from her house on Carlos Street in Woodbrook at midnight, to the (now defunct) mas camp of the Blue Devils of St Clair, and never once did we ever think that we were in any kind of danger. Now? Now I hardly want to go outside in my own yard late at night. I haven’t played Jouvert in years, because too many of my friends have been held up and robbed. And I would never even think of walking with a female friend around Woodbrook in the dead of night in 2004. Over the last two years, the climate in Trinidad has changed drastically, and I ain’t talking weather. Kidnapping is not a new phenomenon, but remember the very first official (and public) kidnapping for ransom, when seemingly overnight kidnapping became the new trend? The entire island went into a panic.

Nobody would let their children go out at night. Everyone thought their family members could be next. My family begged me not to drive alone at night, and many young women I know were not allowed to go out with only female friends. There was a list of off-limit places that were deemed “unsafe” such as certain nightclubs, bars and liming spots. Suddenly everything was about security, everyone was talking about migrating, or getting a gun, or sending their kids abroad. “How can this be happening?” everyone asked themselves. “We don’t have kidnappers in Trinidad!” And now? If someone gets kidnapped, we just say, “Oh shucks, another one get kidnap, yuh hear about it?” as if it is no big deal. We’re becoming more and more desensitised to crime here, because over time, people can get used to anything. It’s a survival skill called adaptability — the ability to adapt to live in any kind of circumstance, no matter how harsh or dangerous, because people have the instinct to survive, to keep going, to take care of themselves and their family, to go to work, and to try to live a normal life despite their environment.

In the deepest darkest regions of the bottom of our planet’s oceans, there is life thriving, reproducing, perfectly adapted to their surroundings. In the most inhospitable climates, like underground caves with high sulfuric levels that are deadly to humans, unique life forms flourish. In the driest, hottest and most barren deserts in Africa, people live, and work, and get married and have babies, and simply survive. In the coldest regions of Antarctica, you will find humans and animals who have adapted to what we would consider uninhabitable. And even the thousands of people living opposite the stench of the La Basse, living next to rivers of stagnant sewage, breathing the smog of the highway every day, find a way to adapt and live and carry on. And their children will do it, too. And so will their children. It’s adaptability.

We can get used to anything – even living in fear. And I’m not talking about fear as in a parrot dive-bombing you kind of fear. I’m talking about adapting to watching your freedom being eroded, where instead of leaving all your doors and windows open at night you now lock every door and cover every opening with burglar proofing until you live like a bird in a cage. I’m talking about adapting to the walls closing in on you, until you are restricted to a limited number of “safe” places but still don’t feel safe. It is not an easy adaptation, in fact it is very stressful, but the fact is we can adapt, and we do adapt, because although many people have gone abroad for their own peace of mind, the rest of us will continue to live here and somehow cope with our every day existence.

A friend of mine packed up her things and left for greener pastures a few months ago. As the kidnappings and murders escalated to an all time high, she said to me she couldn’t take it anymore. She looked around and decided, “This is insane, I can’t live here.” At first I was offended, because I love my country, and home is always home, and I did not want my friend to leave, so I said to her, “Well what do you expect people to do? This is our home, this is where we were born and grew up. You’re saying to just pack up and leave?” And she turned to me, and said, “Yup, leave. You’d be crazy to stay here.”

Some people don’t have the option of leaving. Some people cannot afford to feed their kids, much less buy a plane ticket to migrate. But if you can, should you? Home is where the heart is, but what if your quality of life suffers so much that home feels less and less like home every day? What is the point of living somewhere if you cannot even enjoy life? So now the million-dollar question many people are asking themselves is which are they more willing to adapt to – the pain of leaving your home for foreign countries, or the pain of watching your home being taken away from you, bit by bit, right before your eyes?