Nineteen seventy nine (1979), the year of the first and so far only boycott of Panorama by the Steelband Association, was also the first International Year of the Child. In T&T a new series of T&T postage stamps was launched to commemorate the event. I thought this was wonderful until the new stamps came out. Among them, to my consternation, was one that showed a mother bottle-feeding a child. This was an official stamp of the Republic of T&T, a representation of us, its peoples, and it showed a woman giving a bottle to a child, as if this was the national way of feeding children, as if it was a advertisement for formula and bottles, which in a way, it was.
I wrote to the T&T Postal Corporation and asked why something more culture-friendly and nutritionally-appropriate like a local mother breastfeeding, had not been depicted in the stamp. After some months I received a letter informing me that in their opinion it would have been difficult to find a breastfeeding mother in T&T. I called and asked them who had taken that decision, who thought it was difficult to find a mother breastfeeding her child in T&T, something that I was seeing every day in the hospital and who had been consulted on this.
Nobody was the answer. This was their decision, taken at a Board meeting. "Eminent" members of society, who knew nothing about infant nutrition, besides what they had gleaned from their mothers, wives and other family members, had decided that this was the way children were being fed and had to be fed and had bought in to the propaganda from the companies who made formula and decided to print a postage stamp depicting bottle-feeding as the nutritional hallmark of T&T.
I pointed out that all they had to do was ask any paediatrician at any of the public health centres or hospitals and they would have got loads of breastfeeding mothers.
The answer said more about their colonial mind set than their nutritional knowledge. It was suggested that they really did not want "that sort of image." What image? Well, you know... What? Poor people? Well, not exactly... but some people might take offence at seeing a woman's breasts exposed.
So there you were. Someone or some few people who had never seen a woman breastfeed, knew nothing about breastfeeding or about the dangers of formula feeding, at a time when contaminated formula was regularly found in studies done throughout the West Indies and was a major cause of gastroenteritis, the number one killer of babies in T&T, at a time when we had just began to try to encourage mothers to breastfeed more, had taken it upon themselves to negate our efforts and in the doing, insult every medical professional involved in the care of children and make us the laughing stock of the international medical community. And all they had was to do was call the hospital for advice.
This incident came to mind when I read about the fiasco with the new Driver's Permits. In case you missed it, the Ministry of Works and Transport launched its new driver's permit last week with a hologram of a hummingbird on the document to make it less susceptible to duplication.
Sounds like a good idea, doesn't it? T&T is known as the "Land of the Hummingbird." That is also believed to have been the Native American name for Trinidad. The two birds on the shield of our Coat of Arms are also hummingbirds, no? The logo of Caribbean Airlines is also a hummingbird in flight, despite the fact that no such hummingbird, one with blue wings, exists. Whether this is poetic license, a mistake or a deliberate misrepresentation is unknown.
But everybody appreciates hummingbirds. What better than a picture of local hummingbird on everybody's Driver's Permits then? Spread the word around the world about T&T. Advertise for CAL. Improve security. Everybody happy? Except the hummingbird in question is not a Trini hummingbird. It is not a local species. It is an American hummingbird, not found in T&T. Once again we have been undone by sloppy bureaucratic thinking. I suppose the excuse will be that a hummingbird is a hummingbird is a hummingbird and nobody will know the difference? But because of our local ornithologists, we know. Were they consulted? No. So what particular ignoramus chose this bird?
Once again another professional body has been ignored. Once again we have been undone by the ignorance, arrogance and ineptitude of the Pubic Service. Once again we are made to feel ashamed of being Trinbagonian. We cannot even get a simple thing like the picture of a local bird on a national document right. Thirty seven years after the breastfeeding story and we haven't learned anything.
This is nothing new. In between there have been innumerable stories of similar fiascos. The upside down flags at government buildings. The lack of our national anthem at international athletic meets. The now frequent Presidential boo boos. The Tobago House of Assembly election date, where someone, somehow, could not count to 21. The Transport Commissioner claims that it was a deliberate mistake meant to strengthen the security of the permit and to keep people "baffled." Yes sir, we are baffled with ignorance. Not for nothing are we known as Trickidadians up the islands. Now we are even trying to trick ourselves. The colonial mentality is alive and kicking in T&T.