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Wednesday, July 30, 2025

Homeless ask for COVID-19 information

by

Joshua Seemungal
1960 days ago
20200317

Wash your hands, use hand san­i­tiz­er, don’t touch your face, and try to stay at home.

As the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic wors­ens in­ter­na­tion­al­ly, pub­lic health ad­vice, of the sort, have be­come mantras.

Al­though the mantras res­onate with Vanes­sa Mor­ris, she said, the step to turn words in­to ac­tion is dif­fi­cult.

It’s not for a lack of try­ing, she in­sists.

Home­less since 2013, the Bri­an Lara Prom­e­nade, in Port-of-Spain, is her home.

As she spoke with Guardian Me­dia, the voice of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley as he an­nounced the coun­try’s lat­est mea­sures to com­bat the spread of COVID-19, echoed from mul­ti­ple sources.

“I don’t have a TV, but I hear it’s a virus, and I am not sure about it...Some­times, I get a news­pa­per. I read about it,” Vanes­sa said.

Five days af­ter Min­is­ter of Health Ter­rence Deyals­ingh an­nounced that the coun­try had its first case, Vanes­sa said she’s yet to get any in­for­ma­tion about COVID-19 di­rect­ly.

She was un­aware of how many con­firmed cas­es there were in T&T.

In her trove of items, which she’s gath­ered from dis­card piles, and garbages, over the years, there’s no hand san­i­tiz­er or soap.

Nei­ther of those items has been pro­vid­ed to her by any good samar­i­tans, or pub­lic of­fi­cials, she claimed.

She hopes some­one, prefer­ably pub­lic of­fi­cials, will come and talk to the hun­dreds of oth­er home­less peo­ple in Port-of-Spain soon.

“If I’m scared? Oh, I’ve been through so much on the streets. I’m scared, but not that scared of this. I’ve been through so much more,” she said.

On the op­po­site end of the Prom­e­nade, Ruben Sylvester is search­ing the bins for lunch.

He has called the streets of Port-of-Spain his home for the last twen­ty years.

When asked, what he knows about the virus, he made a claim that he has been deemed sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly in­ac­cu­rate.

“I don’t know if it kills you, or not. As far as I un­der­stand, when a place hot, hot, in a heat­ed coun­try, you don’t catch a cold,” he said.

Like Vanes­sa, he al­so claimed to have not re­ceived any in­for­ma­tion about the virus di­rect­ly.

“I eat things off of the ground and out of the dust­bin. A woman, this morn­ing, told me she thinks she caught the virus. But, I told her the kinds of things I eat, that won’t hap­pen to me,” he joked.

De­spite this, he said he doesn’t have any fear or anx­i­ety about the pan­dem­ic.

This ab­sence of height­ened fear, Sylvester said, is as a re­sult of his ex­pe­ri­ences on the street.

“I’ve sur­vived things you can’t even imag­ine,” he added.

Con­tact­ed to find out whether or not the Port-of-Spain Cor­po­ra­tion had any plans to in­form the home­less about the virus, Deputy May­or Hillan More­an said the cor­po­ra­tion will ful­fil all its pub­lic health re­quire­ments to all burgess­es.

In De­cem­ber 2019, Port-of-Spain May­or Joel Mar­tinez an­nounced plans to move the city’s home­less to a re­fur­bished River­side Plaza.


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