The community of Mayaro was thrust into mourning yesterday, after the body of three-year-old Allon Ramdial was recovered from the Ortoire River, three days after he went missing at the fishing depot there.
It was news neither his mother Christianna Ramdial nor those closest to them in the village wanted to hear.
To those closest to little Allon and his mother, this newspaper offers condolences to the family.
As police now await the results of an autopsy to determine exactly how little Allon died, however, the obvious question must be asked.
Why did the state fail little Allon’s mother?
To be frank, those who read Ms Ramdial’s story over the past few days would have realised this was a scenario that could have been prevented had the state’s social services and other agencies acted when they were supposed to.
The young mother told journalists she was a ward of the St Jude’s Children’s Home before running away from the institution at age 14. That in itself should have triggered a search and investigation with the ultimate objective of getting her safely back under the state’s care.
Of course, this did not occur and a young Ramdial was impregnated months later by someone she has no recollection of because she was in a drunken stupor at the time of the sexual encounter, suggesting the circumstances were far from desirous.
However, even if Ms Ramdial managed to avoid state officials until then, something should have triggered calls to the police and social welfare officers by the nurses who tended to her as a pregnant teenager at hospital. Interventions then too, would have significantly altered Ms Ramdial’s future.
But of course, this is Trinidad and Tobago, where every state agency shirks its responsibility and passes the buck on to the next agency in blame game scenarios.
And so, a few years later, Ms Ramdial found herself in an undesirable situation where she was unable to properly care for her child and resorted to squatting in a room at the Ortoire Fishing Depot.
Neighbours have suggested she took good care of the child. However, a video by Progressive Democratic Patriots leader Watson Duke the day before he disappeared told a different tale. Indeed, little Allon was seen walking all through the facility as Mr Duke toured it, with no sight of parental supervision, save the eyes thrown on him by those individuals there conducting other business.
It has also been suggested that little Allon was Ms Ramdial’s life, with neighbours suggesting she may not be able to cope with his loss. As such, we hope that the state institutions which failed her years ago will wake up and make her case a priority going forward.
It is only in situations like these that citizens realise the importance of state entities entrusted with providing services to the less fortunate within the society, and of the negative repercussions of allowing one individual to fall through the cracks.
Yet another young woman has suffered as a result of the laissez-faire attitude of state entities. We hope this incident will act as a catalyst for these agencies to right their ships so we have no more stories like this latest one.