Bar­ter­ing is a cen­turies-old prac­tice that al­lowed com­mu­ni­ties to ex­change sur­plus goods be­fore the in­tro­duc­tion of stan­dard­ised cur­ren­cy. Now, or­gan­is­ers in San­gre Grande hope to re­vive that spir­it of shar­ing through two Mar­ket Day events aimed at pro­mot­ing sus­tain­abil­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ty sup­port and as­sis­tance for those fac­ing eco­nom­ic chal­lenges.

Ra­men has be­come a sta­ple for uni­ver­si­ty stu­dents not on­ly due to its flavour, but al­so its con­ve­nience and af­ford­abil­i­ty. That’s one of the rea­sons why a lo­cal fam­i­ly-run busi­ness is hop­ing to make cam­pus life a bit eas­i­er for stu­dents by bring­ing the ra­men and com­fort food ex­pe­ri­ence to the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies.

An­dre Ay­ers does not want his grilled-food busi­ness to re­main what many de­scribe as a “hid­den gem of the South.”

School is of­fi­cial­ly out, which means two months of feed­ing chil­dren around the clock. With the cost of gro­ceries es­ca­lat­ing, par­ents are look­ing for ways to keep the house­hold sat­is­fied with­out dig­ging too deeply in­to their pock­ets.

When lo­co­mo­tives haul­ing sug­ar­cane rum­bled through Val­ley­line in Bar­rack­pore on their way to the Usine Ste Madeleine sug­ar fac­to­ry in the 1990s, vil­lage life re­volved around the sug­ar in­dus­try.

As one dri­ves down the Na­pari­ma Ma­yaro Road—what lo­cals in Princes Town call the Main Road—with­in the span of one kilo­me­tre is a se­ries of firsts.

More re­cent­ly, it sparked a vi­ral de­bate over pro­tein pow­ders, leav­ing gym en­thu­si­asts and fit­ness in­flu­encers flex­ing their thoughts in the com­ments.

Ring­worm is a strange dis­ease. First, the name. It does ap­pear in the shape of a ring, but there is no worm in­volved. It gets its name from its vi­su­al ap­pear­ance: a red­dish-brown raised cir­cle on the skin that vague­ly re­sem­bles a worm curled up un­der the skin.

Rain is a bless­ing, but the wet sea­son brings floods, dengue, lep­tospiro­sis and mould, serv­ing as a re­minder that an un­cov­ered bar­rel can cre­ate a med­ical “hotspot” in a neigh­bour­hood. We should pre­pare for ill­ness by watch­ing what these show­ers leave be­hind.

For decades, women have been taught that the month­ly breast self-ex­am­i­na­tion was one of their strongest weapons against breast can­cer.

Al­most fifty years ago, in 1975, at a his­toric sym­po­sium on In­di­ans in the Caribbean, VS Naipaul re­marked, “We for­get; we have no idea of our past; it is part of the trou­ble. We came from a cul­ture that has not been much giv­en to self-ex­am­i­na­tion or to his­tor­i­cal en­quiry.”

In the ear­ly 1980s, vis­i­tors to the Roy­al Botan­ic Gar­dens in Port-of-Spain no­ticed some­thing chang­ing.