Every parent can identify with my joy at Ziya's first time in a Carnival school show. Morning was filled with traditional characters, limbo for the children, a parade of the bands organised by the theme To Protect And To Serve and old-time kaiso.
Zi played in the clearly ironic mas section, The Flying Squad. Her class's lyrics were, "We have to learn our ABC, but it really hard you see. We try to look at the news, but dat giving we the blues, and later on it have de UNC, PNM and ILP. We hear about CIA and then they say is DEA" and so on, ending with "sans humanite."
Music, politics and picong in our national curriculum. It needs to be said, bless teachers, whose labour of love helps our children to love learning, themselves and each other, and who provide those moments that you revisit when your baby has grown up, hopefully to be a better person than you.
That dusk, on my way home, I picked up my neighbour at Mt Hope Hospital. She was rightfully fuming about the $2 million soca and chutney prizes, and about her friend whose husband has been having seizures and can't get an appointment for a MRI until April 2015. By then, he could be worse off or dead. My neighbour was planning a fundraiser after the fete spree was finally over, and was hoping they would make as much as $3,000, not enough to fully access private healthcare, less than the cost of some mas costumes, but an act of love and a help. My neighbour's heartbreak at her friend's weeping was a reminder that the tragedy of "sans humanite" isn't only an old-time refrain.