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Thursday, July 24, 2025

School woes for children who escaped Venezuela

by

Joel Julien
2363 days ago
20190202
Asylum seekers Maria and her daughter, Emma.

Asylum seekers Maria and her daughter, Emma.

When Em­ma was at school in Venezuela she was top of her class.

She came first in ex­ams reg­u­lar­ly and won sev­er­al awards.

Em­ma was al­ways a quick learn­er who loved to go to school.

She hoped to be­come a med­ical doc­tor like her ma­ter­nal grand­fa­ther.

And there was no doubt in the fam­i­ly's mind that she would have achieved that.

But now the sev­en-year-old is not able to prop­er­ly show ex­act­ly how in­tel­li­gent she is.

Em­ma and her moth­er Maria both fled their fam­i­ly's home at Cumana in the Su­cre State in Venezuela to come to T&T two years ago, to es­cape the on­go­ing cri­sis there.

At the time, Maria made the de­ci­sion to flee her home, res­i­dents of the area had be­gun loot­ing su­per­mar­kets to get food to be able to eat.

Maria and Em­ma are now asy­lum seek­ers in this coun­try.

An asy­lum seek­er is a sta­tus giv­en to some­one still await­ing the process of be­ing recog­nised as a refugee.

Ac­cord­ing to the Unit­ed Na­tions High Com­mis­sion­er for Refugees (UN­HCR), a refugee is "a per­son who has fled their coun­try of ori­gin and is un­able or un­will­ing to re­turn be­cause of a well-found­ed fear of be­ing per­se­cut­ed be­cause of their race, re­li­gion, na­tion­al­i­ty, mem­ber­ship of a par­tic­u­lar so­cial group or po­lit­i­cal opin­ion".

Maria be­lieves she fits that de­f­i­n­i­tion.

Ac­cord­ing to 2017 sta­tis­tics, T&T is the third most pop­u­lar coun­try for asy­lum seek­ers in the re­gion.

As of May 2017, there were 336 ap­pli­ca­tions for asy­lum in this coun­try.

In 2016 there were 163 asy­lum ap­pli­ca­tions with Venezue­lans ac­count­ing for the sec­ond largest num­ber of asy­lum seek­ers here.

By the end of 2018, there was a 367 per cent in­crease from the fig­ure at the end of 2017. The ma­jor­i­ty were Venezue­lans.

Be­cause of their sta­tus, asy­lum seek­ers like Em­ma are not able to at­tend school here.

For­eign-born chil­dren of asy­lum-seek­ers and refugees face dif­fi­cul­ties en­ter­ing the pub­lic school sys­tem in this coun­try, Maria said.

Be­cause of im­mi­gra­tion reg­u­la­tions re­quir­ing a stu­dent per­mit, pub­lic ed­u­ca­tion is typ­i­cal­ly not avail­able to asy­lum seek­ers in T&T.

Some pri­vate ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tions may ac­cept stu­dents, how­ev­er, the ex­or­bi­tant costs usu­al­ly at­tached to them are a de­ter­rent.

Asy­lum seek­ers are al­so not al­lowed to legal­ly work here.

"If I had the mon­ey to do send her to pri­vate school I would have be­cause I know here po­ten­tial," Maria said.

As a sort of stop­gap mea­sure the Liv­ing Wa­ters Com­mu­ni­ty, how­ev­er, of­fers ba­sic class­es four days a week to help the chil­dren.

It is not cer­ti­fied by the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion.

While Maria is grate­ful for this she wish­es Em­ma could be chal­lenged in school, and be al­lowed to so­cialise and help her with her Eng­lish.

Maria feels Em­ma is caught in a kind of lim­bo here.

"It is frus­trat­ing to know what she is ca­pa­ble of and that she is not be­ing able to achieve her full po­ten­tial," Maria said.

Maria said her de­ci­sion to come to T&T was to make a bet­ter life es­pe­cial­ly for Em­ma, but some­times she won­ders if she made the right de­ci­sion.

"I hope that they can do some­thing for the chil­dren be­cause what will hap­pen to them when they be­come adults," she said.


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