Sascha Wil­son

Formed in 2009 to help sup­port peo­ple who ex­pe­ri­enced grief or faced with var­i­ous chal­lenges, Wid­ows Sup­port TT has dis­trib­uted lap­tops to six chil­dren.

Founder So­raya Nanan said it was the first dis­tri­b­u­tion of lap­tops and they were giv­en to chil­dren of wid­ows, wid­ow­ers, sin­gle par­ents, and needy fam­i­lies. “We hope to give out more lap­tops to chil­dren be­cause a lot of kids don’t have ac­cess to this on­line learn­ing and the par­ents when they con­tact­ed me some in Stan­dard Four go­ing to write ex­ams next year, some of them are in Form Five and it is very dif­fi­cult for them to con­tin­ue with this on­line learn­ing.”

Not­ing that since the COVID-19 re­stric­tions most chil­dren have been con­fined home, she said the func­tion which was held in Clax­ton Bay al­so pro­vid­ed an op­por­tu­ni­ty for the chil­dren to so­cialise. To lift their spir­its, she al­so gave them treat bags. Nanan formed the group af­ter her hus­band died and she was left to care for their one-year-old son.

“I de­cid­ed to form this sup­port group so that peo­ple could share their sto­ries and I al­ways say by shar­ing your sto­ries you could un­lock some­one’s prison and you know by just in­ter­act­ing with peo­ple like my­self they gain strength. Our mot­to is We Heal and Grieve To­geth­er and what we hope through this group is to help oth­ers heal, grow, and to give them hope and this is how this ven­ture to­day where we are giv­ing out these lap­tops was to give peo­ple hope be­cause grief is not on­ly per­sons who are go­ing through or ex­pe­ri­enc­ing the death of a loved one.”

Speak­ing to re­porters dur­ing the func­tion at Camp de Surya Belle, Tabaquite MP Ani­ta Haynes said while the fo­cus has been on lap­tops, con­sid­er­a­tion must al­so be giv­en to stu­dents who have no ac­cess to the in­ter­net.

She said since Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert spoke about MI­FI tech­nol­o­gy there has been no oth­er up­date.

Com­ment­ing on the JSC Joint Se­lect Com­mit­tee on So­cial Ser­vices and Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion, Haynes said it paint­ed a damn­ing tran­si­tion in­to blend­ed learn­ing.

“It is a very scary sit­u­a­tion for T&T since we are talk­ing about an en­tire gen­er­a­tion of stu­dents for T&T that do not have ac­cess to ed­u­ca­tion, not even qual­i­ty ed­u­ca­tion at this point but ed­u­ca­tion full stop.”

She al­so sug­gest­ed that the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion con­sid­er bring­ing out more stu­dents in Feb­ru­ary in schools with the ca­pac­i­ty to safe­ly ac­com­mo­date them and in keep­ing with COVID-19 pro­to­cols.