In just under five months, the People's Partnership Government has raised close to quarter million dollars for the Children's Life Fund. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said that sum was raised through monthly deductions of ten per cent from the salaries of ministers and parliamentary secretaries and 15 per cent from her pay.
Persad-Bissessar gave an update on the fund at Wednesday's high fashion and haute cuisine charity event Bombay Dreams staged by private citizens in aid of the Children's Life Fund. She said: "I am advised that the amount allocated for the fund as at September 30, 2010 is two hundred and thirty-nine thousand, six hundred and twenty-five dollars ($239,625).
"Last Friday, we laid the Children's Life Fund Bill, 2010 in Parliament. This is the fulfillment of a pledge we made during the last general election, that a Special Children's Life Fund of $100 million, would be established in meeting the cost of life saving specialist medical treatment and surgery for children. Persad-Bissessar said responses such as the Bombay Dreams initiative showed that the kind of national transformation required was possible when citizens could respond so selflessly. "I read somewhere recently poverty being defined as a punishment for a crime you didn't commit. This definition is certainly appropriate when applied to the underprivileged children in urgent need of medical care here and elsewhere.
"The real crime lies in a society's inability or unwillingness to assist a child who needs that help. And it is not a problem that afflicts just the developing world," she said. Persad-Bissessar added: "We live in a world that has become insensitive to the plight of people in general and children in particular. What produces this situation locally is simply the absence of will and funding. The Children's Life Fund is an expression of the will and a formal means of acquiring the funding necessary to address the problem in Trinidad and Tobago."
