Kevon Felmine

Send­ing a stern mes­sage to teenagers at the St Jude's Home for Girls yes­ter­day, act­ing Com­mis­sion­er of Po­lice Stephen Williams told them to stop feel­ing sor­ry for them­selves and take ad­van­tage of the op­por­tu­ni­ties be­ing giv­en to them.In re­cent months, there have been fights at the Bel­mont home and two girls ran away dur­ing a field trip to at­tend a par­ty.Williams said they should not blame any­one for their cur­rent cir­cum­stances, but should leave their past be­hind and look to­ward a suc­cess­ful fu­ture.

Speak­ing at the Port-of-Spain Com­mu­ni­ty Polic­ing Unit's sum­mer camp grad­u­a­tion at the home yes­ter­day, Williams pledged the T&T Po­lice Ser­vice's sup­port in cre­at­ing an en­vi­ron­ment that would fos­ter a promis­ing fu­ture for the girls. "I want you to stop feel­ing sor­ry for your­selves, I want you to start think­ing about how you can en­sure that you can be­come a suc­cess­ful adult. Take your God-giv­en tal­ents and work with it over and over, the same way you prac­tised the elec­tric slide and every­thing else.

"Your achieve­ment in life de­pends heav­i­ly on you, be­cause at­ti­tude and be­hav­iour is all dri­ven by the in­di­vid­ual. What hap­pens to­day, what hap­pens to­mor­row, what hap­pens in the dis­tant fu­ture, you have a large part to play in that."What hap­pened in the past has gone, so I want to en­cour­age you to see life the way you need to see life. There are tremen­dous op­por­tu­ni­ties–but there is a jour­ney. This jour­ney has some re­stric­tions for you, but there are op­por­tu­ni­ties and you have to take ad­van­tage of them," Williams said.

He promised to adopt the home as one of the po­lice youth clubs, which would af­ford the girls train­ing and life skills pro­grammes. As a first mea­sure, he promised to source ad­di­tion­al com­put­ers for their lab."I am aware that there have been some events with­in the re­cent past, some events. They were neg­a­tive events, but they were in the past and we can learn from those events in or­der for us to ap­pre­ci­ate that there is a need to do far more for you," Williams said.

Dur­ing the two weeks of the camp, the girls were lec­tured on life skills, eti­quette, hy­giene, do­mes­tic vi­o­lence, bul­ly­ing, as well as be­ing taught jew­el­ry-mak­ing and dance.In­sp Cur­tis Paul said the camp was held af­ter mem­bers of the po­lice vis­it­ed the school and saw that the stu­dents need­ed an in­ter­ven­tion. He said it was the first pro­gramme to be held there, but it would not be the last.