Do you want me to put up the tree on Sunday?
I had been nagging him for weeks.
I'm going to Laventille.
He did what he usually does when he hears something he doesn't like.
He ignores me.
Around three in the afternoon then? I'll bring up the lights.
Can we go to the mall Mummy? Asks my 16-year-old daughter
No baby. I am going to Laventille. She laughs.
Mummy you have such outlandish ideas.
My son: While you are at it why don't you go to Pakistan?
They reminded me of my abandoned plans after yet another bombing there.
I gritted my teeth. I will get there too.
Are you going to Laventille? Asks my mother after my children snitched?
Yes I am.
You can't.
There was no arguing with that.
But they tried.
Go with the MP
Go with the police
Get a bullet proof vest
Four murders overnight. Murder toll now 461.
T&T has the second highest murder rate in the world for a "non warring" country. I'd been to Laventille, I explained to them, many times, years ago and felt very safe and welcomed. How can I have grandiose dreams of covering Afganistan and Pakistan when I can't roam cover my own country? Besides, I wanted to experience Christmas there. My intrepid friend Marie Abdullah upon hearing I was going, said she would accompany me and to the surprise of everyone, this chic French woman (with red shoes and bag, sunglasses firmly on a riot of curls) and I rattled up the hill in the car weighed down by us, two social workers, and a male friend the husband sent to keep an eye on us.
Not understanding that my visit was spurred by a documentary launched last week where a dozen women talked about their dead sons murdered by machine and handmade guns, many from Laventille, (and which singularly failed to ask or answer the question "why" to the daily murders) we initially got a guided tour of the "scenic spots." I went looking for answers. Straight up we drove, to a view of the sea and mountains which left us speechless on the ledge of a hill at the pristine Laventille Youth Facility where young girls were preparing the stage for a concert that evening.
Marie and I agreed that the only view in T&T even remotely rivalling this was the "look out" on Lady Young Road. The sea on that grey day looked steely, sheets of ice, reflecting beams of light found in depictions of a Christian heaven. As the shadows grew longer the hills glowed emerald. Sounds of a solitary distant steel pan from Despers yard, on quiet streets wrapped picturesquely around the hillside, verandas of brightly painted homes, gleam with new curtains, sparkling with trees, and fairy lights.
We drive up to the best kept secret in Trinidad. The East Port-of-Spain Complex where a nondescript entrance reveals a thrilling auditorium, seats covered in plush ruby velvet. Like Alice in Wonderland it got curiouser and curiouser. Plays are held there, musical production made. I knew I would be back. On our way out, we see a flurry of activity outside the anglican church on the hill which in that afternoon silhouetted as if in a painting against a moving sky. The Lydian Singers are expected tonight. Wrapping around the hills that lead to all parts of Trinidad, the car we are in heaves up Picton Road, and stops. Two women hail out Trevor, our guide and a true soldier of Laventille, who looks upon, nourishes, and protects the vulnerable like a tender father.
We lime by the side of the road, Marie and I with a woman and her 23 year old impeccably dressed daughter, (training to be a geriatric nurse,) and a third woman with a jolly laugh who now lives in Barataria but socialises in Laventille. The girl was saying she never put her address on job applications as it guaranteed disappointment: "If you say you are from Laventille you don't get the job."
Her mother adds: "You can't stigmatise us. There is good and bad everywhere, you understand? We are a huge community stretching from East Dry River to Morvant Junction to parts of Belmont." She adds, "We all know one another, and help one another." She asked me, "Do you know your neighbour?" I didn't.
Her son a "red" boy in his 20s with a wide smile walking by with a laptop case on his back stops to chat. He refuses to talk about murder, drugs, crime, and the power of the gun in this place. "I have to keep myself out of it" he says firmly, "it's easy to get into it and I don't want to allow my head to go there." Then asks a question. "As a mother how would you feel if your son came home with a gold chain and cash for you, and you know he is not working, but you have five children with nothing for Christmas?" People here, like everywhere in Trinidad, speak in parables, in code language. An invisible hand, threatening and, powerful hand guides their conversation.
I realised then, that be it in the corridors of power, or standing by the light pole in St Barbs Laventille that we will never know the truth about ourselves because everyone in this country is afraid; of the drug barons, gun importers, police, politicians, army, of the hoards of young people who can't read and write and use the gun with much more ease than they do a pen. In the fading light, in the timeless tableaus of the pose struck by the girl on stage, the basketball court flooded with mothers and children on a Christmas sports day, roads carved into the hills like an elaborate wedding cake, a maze that leads to all parts of Trinidad, we could have been in some fancy tourist destination
I hadn't yet seen the side of Laventille where the grim reaper regularly ravages the young. But this is Boxing Day. So I leave you with the Christmas Card image that this community has burnt into my memory of the church against a moving grey sky and a panorama of sea and mountains. To be continued.