“A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops”, Henry Adams: The Education of Henry Adams
The recent distribution of contraceptives outside of a Port-of-Spain secondary school has titillated the simple minded few, and triggered moral outrage among middle and upper income groups.
And while its stated objective, that of an assault on HIV/AIDS, may have been an absurdity, its supporting message, the need to tackle poverty, through a reduction in teenage pregnancies among the urban poor and the misguided, was valid. It was misleading, though unintentionally, to convey that the spread of HIV/AIDS could be halted through the use of contraceptives. Instead it would have been better had the children been told that the ideal way to control its spread was through abstinence from sex, before and/or outside of marriage, and sticking to single partner relationships.
The need to confront the crucial issue of HIV/AIDS has to be discharged if thousands more of our citizens are not to become additional statistics of the horrible virus/disease. But it must be confronted on the basis of positive parenting, education and moral and spiritual values, rather than with the absurdity of prophylactic sheaths. This was the primary aim of the contraceptives distribution exercise, yet the use of contraceptives is not and never has been a 100 percent guarantee against HIV infection, indeed against any sexually transmitted disease. What is critical, however, is the need to instil in our young people, as it is in the United States or the United Kingdom, among others, that casual sex, and with it casual pregnancies, can not be the way forward.
The uncomfortable reality today is that there are too many teenage girls, and even some innocents in their pre-teens, who are dabbling in sex and simple-mindedly looking forward to having babies for their equally irresponsible boyfriends. And, ironically, in much the same way that properly focused young teenagers look forward to the acquiring of careers in the professions through years of committed study at a University or other tertiary institution. Many of the misguided children come from large, lower income families where, perhaps because of the number of siblings, are not able to communicate on a regular basis, or hardly at all, with their parents, and in the process experience the joys of needed sympathy and love. Or if from a single-parent home, then with their mothers, or in rare cases, with their fathers.
Unfortunately, all too often in these circumstances there is the lack of opportunity to discuss with their parents matters of troubling concern to them, or even merely the chance to chit chat with them about the hundred and one things that girls, in far happier circumstance, are wont to take for granted. The girls may grow up also with a regular lack of money to buy the things, many of them governed by simple taste and childish longing.
They are poor, and their poverty of money all too often breeds poverty of spirit. Unhappily, it is this poverty of spirit, continuously aggravated by a dearth of parent/daughter communication and advice, which sees them running, first to equally circumstanced peers to unburden themselves, and later to young men for the attention and love they see as denied them at home.
They and the youths grope in backyards, in cinemas, or in every available dark corner. Mistakenly, to their young immature minds this is love. Eventually, unless they are able either to secure guidance or advice that it is all shams and shadows, theirs is a succession of young men, who impregnate them and move on to other and equally gullible girls. The girls may have learned a lesson, but it is a lesson in bitterness and mistrust they may in turn teach their sons and daughters, though to each in a different way. But boys, too, can themselves be victims of a lack of love at home. The critical difference being that should they have absentee fathers, who were village Romeos, then these fathers would be their standard. They are just as lonely as the girls, only that they (the boys) become predators.
Henry Adams, the author/philosopher, the quotation from whose work, The Education of Henry Adams, introduces today’s Column, praised his father’s character with providing a far deal greater to his education than any other individual’s influence. Adams’ father had not betrayed him, his hopes and longing as a child, unlike so many fathers around today, and not necessarily from lower income groups. Perhaps I have strayed. More people need to go out to the socially deprived areas and interest themselves in assisting with the educating of the young, including the pre-schoolers. Today’s urban, suburban and rural lower income children need to be set realistic, positive goals, to be encouraged to seek to acquire skills, and some, ultimately, professions. Their parents must also be urged on to upgrade their efficiency, if need be through attending Adult Education classes. In turn, they should be exposed to Workshops in Positive Parenting. We must teach them to assist and to guide their children to gradually assume the mantle of responsibility. Built into all of this will be the aim of reducing unwanted and unneeded levels of poverty, including the most challenging of all — poverty of spirit.
I switch gears. Recently, I attended the funeral of an old friend and former colleague at the Trinidad Guardian — John Alleyne, the third former newsman at the Guardian’s Southern Branch to die within the past year. The others were Hammond Koylass and Milton Bartley. I had known John Alleyne from the days when the June 19, 1937 Social Revolution led by Tubal Uriah Butler was still recent history. John Alleyne’s had been a massive contribution to the development of sport, whether football, cricket, lawn tennis, table tennis, golf in South Trinidad, and, ultimately, in the whole of Trinidad and Tobago. He had played in all of those games, and had been one of the driving forces (forgive the cliche) behind Lanes Club, at one time one of the leading sporting clubs in the country. I would perhaps never have known that organised sporting events in San Fernando had been held at Paradise Pasture, until 1932, when it was shifted to Skinner’s Park “as a result of the gift of the land to the San Fernando Borough Council by the Ste Madeleine Sugar Company Limited”, had John Alleyne not made this known to me about two decades ago. Indeed, I had always believed that the land had been a gift from Gilbert Skinner, after whom the Park had been named. It had turned out instead that Skinner had been General Manager of Usine at the time.
There were several persons at John Alleyne’s funeral, whom I had known from my childhood days in San Fernando, including Oliver Henry, with whom I had often discussed politics as a teenager; John Kennedy (JK), who had played for Young Sheffield, one of the top teams of the heyday of football in the South, and Seymour Taylor of Old Sheffield. Any discussion of San Fernando football and the talk invariably turns to JK, Taylor, Alleyne, Ancil (Baba) Adams, Poona Halls, Fedo Lloyd, and JK’s brother, Boboy Kennedy. John Alleyne’s contribution to San Fernando sport has been monumental, and it would be fitting if the suggestion that Skinner’s Park be renamed John Alleyne’s Park in his honour is followed through.
