Valdeen Shears-Neptune 

For most men having an invasive prostate exam is emasculating and humiliating but for Thomas Espinoza, being proactive about men’s health shows the strength and courage of manhood.

Espinoza, a former superintendent of prisons, is doubtful he would be alive to celebrate his 60th birthday next month, had he shied away from having a Digital Rectal Examination (DRE) done earlier this year. This test entails the insertion of the doctor’s finger into the patient’s rectum to feel for bumps and abnormalities in the prostate gland. 

A stickler for keeping abreast with his health, Espinoza noted that it was also not the first time he had done the test. Now on pre-retirement leave, Espinoza is recovering from surgery having been diagnosed in March with Stage 111 prostate cancer. The father of four had surgery done on April 7. 

Espinoza had some words of advice for fathers and men in general: “Please fathers, do the tests, if not for yourself, then find out for your children, to lengthen your lives so you can be there for them. To see them grow into men and women and then to encourage them to do the same.”

Espinoza, who spent 38 years in the prisons service and is outgoing president of the Prisons’ Youth Club, said it was ironic that he had felt he was “on top of things” regarding his health. 

At age 40, he had the Prostate-specific Antigen (PSA) test done. This test offers a rating from 0.0 to 0.4 as safe from cancer. A rating over four would result in the patient being urged to have a rectal ultrasound done and subsequent biopsy. Espinoza did not wait for doctors to tell him to have the test done annually. He knew he was predisposed, as his father died from prostate cancer in 1995. 

His first PSA test, he said, indicated all was well and continued this way up until last year. His PSA tests, though, had been showing a steady increase in levels from 0.4 to 3.8 by the time he felt his first sign that something was wrong. 

“I had no real signs that I was ill. Nothing, save for a funny sensation in my privates a couple months ago for two days. I also found that it took a little while longer for me to urinate, but I took medication for stoppage of water and felt fine. That’s the trick with cancer, it can creep up on you when you think you are as fit as a fiddle and in the prime of your life,” he said. 

As an infirmary officer, Espinoza said he was known by his family and colleagues to be a watchdog for good health. He said red flags went up when he felt those funny sensations and he had another DRE done in February this year. This was followed by an ultrasound and biopsy. 

Of the six samples taken, three came back malignant, with one sample being deemed 100 per cent cancerous. 

“Think about it, had I just shrugged off that feeling, felt like I had done enough rectal tests and considered myself safe because my blood test said I was below the safe level, then where would I be today?” he asked. 

Doctors, he said, found that the cancer had been contained in the prostate gland and were able to remove all. 

Espinoza said he remains thankful to God, his doctors at Medical Associates, and to Commissioner of Prisons Sterling Stewart and Deputy Commissioner Michael Walker for their support in expediting the process to facilitate his surgery. 

Men are more proactive—Fuad Khan 
Dr Fuad Khan, urologist and former minister of health, said the numbers have definetly changed as men are more proactive and are accessing screening more. 

“It may not have lessened the number of cases of prostate cancer, but it certainly has increased early detection and lives saved,” he stated. 

Khan added that while the DRE was a “no-no” for years for most men, awareness and the new advances in treatment are assisting in increasing the number of screenings done year by year. 

In a Guardian article a couple years ago, Khan had indicated the introduction of the robotic prostatectomy method. The treatment is minimally invasive and uses robots to remove the prostate gland. However, it would have cost the country over US$1 million, plus the cost of disposables to bring the machine here. 

Khan recommended that the University of the West Indies consider purchasing one for training purposes. This aside, Khan said even with a cancer diagnosis, there are other options besides surgery. 

Khan said The High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU) is highly recommended because it does not require any surgery. The procedure involves the insertion of a miniscule ultrasound tube into the rectum and the melting of the abnormal cells. It is also the only treatment that does not lead to erectile dysfunction. He said he has performed over four such procedures and to date, his patients are doing well. 

Screening jumps significantly in one year 
Sherma Mills-Serrette, clinic manager at the T&T Cancer Society supported this by saying the clinic has seen a significant increase in screening from last year to date. In a telephone interview last week, Mills-Serrett said last year the clinic recorded over 400 screenings for prostate cancer. However, to date, the figure has crossed 800, she noted. 

The society, she added, is always working on strategies to raise further awareness and dispel the notion that the DRE tests is negative in any way. 

“We need people, men to adopt the thinking that this test is as required as immunisation when you are a child. For protection, see it as a medical procedure and nothing else. See it as the test that could very well save your life,” Mills-Serrett said. 

She also noted that people often allow fear of the unknown to get the better of them.

A prostate test, she said, is not conducted to detect only cancer. In some cases a man may have developed an enlarged prostate gland or prostatitis—inflammation in the gland. There is treatment for both conditions.

FACTS ABOUT PROSTATE 
From birth to 40 the prostate gland remains unchanged. The gland is likened to that of a walnut and is supposed to be ridged or lined. If it is smooth then this is a sign that there is some sign of abnormality. This does not mean cancer. Early detection is the only protection against cancer. 
It is recommended that both tests be done, because none are completely reliable on its own

Visually impaired Anil Waithe wants to leave an indelible mark in T&T and the wider world by empowering people like himself to be able to access an education.

Waithe, 30, has known success most of his life, coming into the eyes of the public at the tender age of ten, when he was a student at the Tacarigua Presbyterian Primary School and then moving on to Hillview College.

But that was not the end for Waithe, he went on to the University of the West Indies and graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Information Technology and is now completing his master’s degree.

“There is nothing that I limit myself that I can’t do,” Waithe said, “However, my achievement...it was not easy being visually impaired. It’s not at all a walk in the park.”

He said he was happy with his success however, he is concerned about others like him who may want to follow in his path and access an education. In secondary school, Waithe had little support but he was so motivated to learn, he ended up advocating for himself 100 per cent. 

In order to survive within the regular classroom environment, where most teachers seemed to have no time or interest in finding ways to support him, Waithe said on his own initiative he took a tape recorder to classes.

Speaking with Waithe at his Tunapuna, home, the computer whiz, jovial and full of jokes, made light of the difficulties accessing the basic necessities in T&T.

Waithe added: “I must boast that I was responsible for offering the first Windows 8 course in 2013 to visually impaired and blind individuals in the Caribbean through the use of voice over IP and virtualisation technology. In addition, I also configured an accessible Windows 7 installation and a Client for Use on Facebook.

“I was also instrumental in creating an Internet radio station just for persons who are visually impaired but at this moment, it’s off air but should be back on very soon.” Motivated and determined, Waithe has come up with another solution. He wants to purchase a Premier 100 Braille Embosser, which comes with Tiger Suite software from View Plus Technologies based in the US. 

This is a sturdy embosser which will not only produce excellent quality braille in high volume but it also produces the highest quality tactile graphics available. Having this embosser will provide Waithe with much needed access to curriculum materials which his sighted university peers have the luxury of accessing very easily.

“Although there are similar embossers in T&T, it does not suit the needs of the visually impaired. This machine can create diagrams for examinations. Also, this can open so many doors to make the visually impaired empowered,” Waithe added.

Waithe said his decision to get the machine was based on the many challenges he has faced trying to get an education. He wants to empower other visually-impaired people to be able to access an education without facing the uphill battle that he encountered.

So far, Waithe has set up an account on the Go Fund Me website and the name of the account is Braille Embosser Quest. Waithe has raised TT$5,000 dollars towards the embosser. The embosser costs US$13,000. 

“I am asking T&T to support my cause as I believe this will change the landscape of education for the visually impaired and also printed braille material in all spheres,” Waithe added.

Avril Harry RN, BSc Oncology Nursing
Pink Hibiscus Breast Health Specialist 

Countless times I’ve heard clients say that they’ve not been too inclined to have screening for fear they might have to do some form of diagnostic procedure like a needle test (fine needle aspiration) or biopsy as discussed in last week’s article. 

A diagnosis of breast cancer causes insurmountable anxiety. Patients have considerable concerns, and quite rightfully so. Of paramount importance is the provision of a holistic approach inclusive of meeting their emotional needs. Equally important are concerns about the next steps in the journey such as how cancer treatment will impact on their everyday lives, ability to care for children, relationships with spouses or partners, body image, sexuality, and fertility (for women of childbearing age). 

Similarly, they express concern about surgery which is understandable. However, there is immense trepidation from the possibility that other treatments may be involved such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy. We have been sharing repeatedly and cannot overemphasise that annual screening allows us to identify cancers in their earliest stages so as to avoid other treatment modalities such as chemotherapy or radiation. 

In 2016 we continue to hold the view that no woman should have to die from breast cancer. And it has been proven. Along with my colleagues, we have had the amazing opportunity of witnessing this first-hand, as early detection strategies can improve outcomes. Breast cancer diagnosis is no longer a death sentence. 

Of course, some people may say, “But my cancer was caught early why might I need surgery or chemotherapy?” Of note, one size doesn’t fit all when it comes to treatment. Standard treatment for breast cancer may include surgery of varying types, with or without radiation and with or without chemotherapy, hormonal therapy, and targeted therapies. 

Firstly, surgery in most instances is the first step. The aim of the treatment is considered localised. In localised breast cancer, the goal is always curative. Treatment of localised breast cancer is today often multimodal. 

Multiple treatment modalities are combined to give the best possible results and to give the patient the possibility of saving the good aspects of their breast, this is referred to as breast conservation surgery. The tumour size and characteristics, possible lymph node spreading, and the age of the patient will dictate which treatment is appropriate. 

There are a variety of treatment options which in turn can achieve good results. The landscape of breast cancer treatment continues to evolve and with comprehensive screening and early detection, people may not have to undergo the harsh treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation therapy. 

While scientific research on most complementary therapies is relatively new and the studies are small, early results show that some complementary therapies may help ease physical and emotional symptoms associated with breast cancer treatment in some people. When combined with conventional medicine, complementary therapies may offer a more integrated approach to healing. 

There are several complementary/holistic techniques that may help ease fear and stress. These may include aromatherapy, guided imagery, journaling, massage, meditation, music therapy and support groups. Though it is always recommended that there be collaboration with your breast specialist/oncologist prior to the commencement of these agents. 

There has been a lot of research into improving cancer treatments, and this research will continue. This means that today’s cancer treatments are easier to cope with than they used to be and have less severe side effects that are often more easily controlled. 

Talk to your breast specialist doctor or nurse about any concerns you may have about your treatment.

“Your reaction is just as important as my reaction. Fifty per cent of the work is your response.” This statement from artist Wendy Nanan, delivered on April 22, at her artist talk at Medulla Gallery, formed the foundation for fifty-fifty, an installation and conversation on the role of responses to art in T&T. 

Fifty-fifty was conceptualised by art scholar and Sunday Arts writer Marsha Pearce in conjunction with Medulla Art Gallery. It was held with support from North Eleven Projection and the Invisible Creative. 

On June 7, at Medulla, Fitt Street, Woodbrook, Pearce led an artists’ panel in discussion of these gravid notions of art ownership; the fundamental perceptions of contemporary and traditional art in T&T; the accessibility and range of critique with which local art is treated; and a host of other concerns. 

The panel comprised five creative practitioners who live, work and produce art locally: poet Andre Bagoo, and visual artists Alicia Milne, Richard Rawlins, Edward Bowen and Adele Todd. Pearce provided the Sunday Arts Section with a recording of the event, on which this story is based. 

Early in the conversation, Todd established a spirit of collective, communal art inspiration. Citing Wendy Nanan, Todd said, “Without the kind of work she was doing…I don’t think I would be able to do the kind of work I do.” 

Highlighting Nanan’s creative influence in her life as paramount, Todd citied the 2005 Cricket, Lovely Cricket series for its minimalist strength, calling it an “extremely important moment in our art history.”

As would most of the panellists that evening, Todd went on to ask challenging questions, themselves prompted by the line of discourse that Pearce put to her panel. 

One such question was, “Most people come into a gallery space and they are impacted by the red dots on the wall, perhaps?” (Gallerists stick red dots next to pieces that have been sold.) Todd says her response to art goes beyond its baseline, saleable nature. 

“There is a safety in not rocking the boat,” said Richard Rawlins, who has mounted numerous exhibitions in both local and foreign spaces. At art shows, he said, “the wine and the gossip about other things takes over—a backdrop to an evening of entertainment, perhaps.” 

Frustrated by the hyper-intellectualised, verbose artist statements that accompany the majority of contemporary shows, Rawlins used a posey—a chamber pot—as his artist’s statement for his 2013 Steupps show. 

Offering the posey as a receptacle to invite audience interpretations of an artist’s statement revealed to Rawlins that most people did not understand what an artist’s statement was. “We don’t really understand what criticism means here. We do not treat a review of work here as we would elsewhere,” he said.

Value, Rawlins said, is frequently and enthusiastically ascribed to art selected to “hang in restaurants, embassies and banks.” He reminded the Medulla gathering that, outside of the evening’s attendees, T&T contemporary artists Christopher Cozier, Nikolai Noel and Dean Arlen were scarcely household names, not when compared to the iconic weight of masman Peter Minshall or fashion designer Meiling. This led Rawlins to contemplate the public perception of the contemporary artist’s value in T&T society.

Alicia Milne compared Wendy Nanan’s 2016 show to the 2015 collective exhibition (S)how, in which Milne exhibited work alongside Jaime Lee Loy, Nikolai Noel, Tamara Tam-Cruickshank and Luis Vasquez La Roche. 

Remarking on the wealth of critical and artistic response to the former, Milne speculated, “I wonder how this pouring of responses has come to be. Is it because she (Nanan) has a long-standing career in Trinidad that commands attention? Or is it because the show was full of vulvas?” 

Responding to Milne’s concerns on which art exhibitions marshall the lion’s share of response, Andre Bagoo playfully said, “I do think bribing the audience does help in terms of engaging them,” referencing the piece-naming competition that was part of Nanan’s 2016 show. 

Bagoo shared his poem The Body in the River as an engagement with the themes of fifty-fifty, explaining that the poem was itself a Frankenstein composition, borrowing liberally from the 16th century English play Richard III while also taking lines from 20th century Bohemian-Austrian poet Rilke. Written in response to both Shakespeare and Nanan’s work, the piece raised questions of “What is the boundary? Did I write this poem or was it determined that I would write this poem?”

Edward Bowen, whose artistic career in Trinidad spans some three decades, challenged the Medulla audience to resist conservative approaches to art acquisition and practice. Full of vitriol for the corporate sector of T&T, which he said has done precious little to educate itself on the evolving nature of artistic needs, Bowen championed the channelling of rage and aggression in creating one’s pieces. 

Citing Mancrab, the groundbreaking king from Peter Minshall’s 1983 Carnival band River, Bowen said that the relentlessly severe and brutal presentation of that mas has haunted him and his work since its creation. 

With a literal nod to Minshall, who was present at the fifty-fifty gathering, Bowen said, “We have to be so brutally realistic with our positions as artists. We are actually not on the fringe of society. “We are the ones in the centre who process the essences, the ideas—you have to be in it, like the lotus flower in the mud.”

The vigorous debate that ensued following Todd, Bagoo, Rawlins, Milne and Bowen’s roundtable reflections focused on the need for an interrogation and dismissal of failing governmental infrastructure around art. Artist Andy Jacob lambasted the dearth of qualified, structured reviewership in T&T, saying that “A great artist needs a great reviewer.” 

It has been through education, Bowen responded, that the majority of possibilities for critical thought in T&T art have emerged. 

Bagoo added that the playing field of reviewership type and scope has been broadened by the wide accessibility of social media. The veil is thinning between artists and their audiences, Bagoo concluded, in ways that are easier than ever to digitally harness. 

Even if the Government and corporate world consistently fail and disappoint working artists, Rawlins said, it remains commendable and inspiring that young “first-jobbers” use their disposable income to buy art.

Fifty-fifty offered no easy consensus to the questions posed by Pearce: it instead reminded both the artists’ panel and the audience that such convocations are necessary, for as long as such questions continue to be paramount in our local arts environment.

Arts educator and poet Arielle John exudes an aura of intensity and focus, whether performing spoken word on stage, talking about human rights activism or describing her work with teenagers. It’s little wonder that she’s been accepted by the prestigious Goldsmiths, University of London, to pursue an MA in performance and culture.

However, she needs to find $228,000 in order to pursue her dream.

The 27-year-old has been involved in arts education and youth advocacy for a number of years. It began when she worked with Arts-in-Action, an applied theatre arts organisation at UWI, St Augustine. A teenage interest in social justice and human rights activism initially led to her studying law through the University of London’s International Program. 

Then John discovered a passion for performance poetry. It “ultimately led me to spend more time at the theatre department at UWI than within my own programme,” she said. 

“Performing allows me to do the same kind of advocacy work that I wanted to accomplish as a lawyer, but with a sense of immediacy and direct action.”

John said her desire to impact lives led her to study theatre and social change at the City University of New York. 

The idea of art that challenges and questions the status quo remained a guiding principle for her work as an emerging artist. “I wrote and developed my first one-woman show, Cascadoo, as a thesis study examining Caribbean women’s narratives through transatlantic movement and migration, and definitions of ‘home’ for a people whose lives seem to be perpetually transient.”

John also spent three years working as a teaching assistant at the college, mentoring high school students who were taking an introductory college theatre course, and various other additional teaching opportunities. 

“After graduation, I began working with the Brooklyn College Community Partnership as a teaching artist, facilitating after-school workshops with at-risk youth in poetry and theatre. This particular environment allowed for much meaningful dialogue and exchange with the students, leading to the development of powerful ethnographic writing and performance activities in the school.”

She continued, “In 2014 in my Brooklyn neighbourhood I launched The Lagniappe Project which involved an archiving process through photography, that sought to capture the West Indian community being threatened by displacement due to the rapid gentrification of the area. 

“The photographs were taken during our annual block party as a statement of presence and a claiming of space, all in the theatre of the street. Prints of the images were distributed to community members in addition to an online gallery with public access.”

John said she was intrigued by the ability of the immigrant West Indian community to transfer culture from one region to another, “as largely demonstrated by the preparation and practices surrounding the annual West Indian Labor Day Parade in Brooklyn, Notting Hill Carnival and Caribana in Toronto. I have partnered with a Brooklyn-based arts organisation, caribBeing, to develop ongoing work and research into Carnival celebrations and what they mean in a removed immigrant context, their relevancy and new developments, particularly in such a volatile community.”

John represented T&T in the 2008 Brave New Voices International Youth Poetry Slam competition, and she was also a 2009 finalist in its Speak Green environmental poetry competition held in Chicago. 

She was a valued member of the Brooklyn College Poetry Slam Team, which placed second in America at the National Inter-College Poetry Slam (CUPSI) in 2013. John was a 2015 Callaloo Fellow (Oxford University) and is the author of an electronic chapbook Songs in a Strange Land. 

John has worked on a number of productions, including the writing, directing and performance of a devised work titled All Halal Trucks go to Heaven, a critique of American Islamophobia, as well as directing Ann Wuehler’s Doll Cargo, a short-play that offers a troubling narrative of American women who are trafficking other young women for prostitution.

John is the creative director of the 2 Cents Movement, a performing-arts non-profit which pursues youth developmental work through the use of spoken word poetry, involving a variety of social engagement initiatives. The group collaborates with the NGC Bocas Lit Fest annually to stage poetry and spoken word workshops at schools and poetry slams, sponsored by Courts and First Citizens, respectively, for secondary schools and the wider public.

“I’ve been finding innovative ways to use the existing culture and technology to motivate young people to think critically, express themselves creatively and act positively in changing their world. Part of my strategy as a creative has been to approach theatre with an aim to explore multiculturalism and the performance of power.”

John said when she finishes the MA, she will continue to teach, and plans to go wherever she can be of service.

First, however, there’s that small matter of the $228,000. As part of her fund-raising efforts, she has started a GoFundMe drive; donors can also contribute via RBC Account #100002172094287.

more info
Go to Arielle John's GoFundMe page at gofundme.com/ariegoesgold, or call 490-8876.

In this the 17th instalment of the continuing series, Food for Thought/ Grow & Eat Local, we focus on the guava fruit, Psidium guajava, that bears on a relatively small tree in the Myrtle family (Myrtaceae). Guava has taken a beating here in T&T in more recent times. The term “guava season” is used to describe a period of difficulty, of economic woe and hardship, when there is nothing to eat but wild fruit like guava…when it used to be wild.

Here in T&T, we tend to gravitate towards fruits and foods that are not local. Estimates are that our food import bill is near TT$5 billion annually and growing. Did you know that in the 1960s the Macqueripe/Tucker Valley was lush with citrus and banana fields producing more than enough to supply the nation? In other fertile areas other crops were prolific.

Oil centricity, industrialisation and non-agricultural business have essentially put paid significantly to the agricultural sector. It is critical that we as a nation engage and support the resurrection and revival of local food production (eg in schools), processing and consumption. As a country, we must place greater emphasis on food sovereignty as a matter of urgent attention. For example, better roads are needed as highlighted in the Guardian recently. http://www.guardian.co.tt/news/2016-06-14/couva-farmers-want-road-fixed. 

Guava’s place of origin is uncertain, but it is believed to be an area extending from southern Mexico into or through Central America and thereafter distributed throughout tropical America and the Caribbean region. Guavas were adopted as a crop in subtropical and tropical Asia, the southern United States and tropical Africa.  

The most frequently eaten species, and the one often simply referred to as “the guava,” is the apple guava. The fruits are multi-seeded berries. The term “guava” appears to derive from Arawak guayabo “guava tree,” via the Spanish guayaba. Several species are grown commercially; the apple guava and its cultivars are the most commonly traded internationally.

Around the world, guava cultivars have been developed with fruit of varying external and internal flesh colour, seediness, sweetness, shape and size.  In Trinidad, a large, white-fleshed type is commonly known as ‘Cayenne’. Another is the ‘Centeno Prolific’, a small fruited but prolific bearer which was selected by the Ministry of Agriculture for use in processing.

The fruit has also been developed specifically for processing and for the fresh-fruit market (also known as Table Type cultivars). Of particular interest is the large (ten-15cm) fruited pear-shaped green guava (with white, crisp and sweet flesh) which originated from Thailand

Guavas are of interest to home growers in subtropical areas as one of the few tropical fruits that can grow to fruiting size in pots indoors. When grown from seed, guavas bear fruit as soon as two years and thereafter, as long as 40 years. While the tree will have fruit throughout the year, here in Trinidad, the main guava crop coincides with the long school vacation period between July and August. 

Guava is a small tree with spreading branches, it is easy to recognise because of its smooth, thin, copper-coloured bark that flakes off, showing the greenish layer beneath, and also because of the “bony” aspect of its trunk which may reach a diameter of ten inches (25 cm).

Mature trees of most species are fairly cold-hardy and can survive temperatures slightly colder than 25 °F (−4 °C) for short periods of time, but younger plants will likely freeze and die. The tree is drought tolerant but in dry regions, lack of irrigation during the period of fruit development will cause the fruits to be very small in size. The fruit matures 90 to 150 days after flowering. 

Guavas exude a strong, sweet, musky odour when ripe, may be round, ovoid, or pear-shaped, (five-ten cm) long, with four or five protruding floral remnants (sepals) at the apex. The immature fruit are green in colour and when ripe, outer skin colour can vary from pale green, light-yellow or dark yellow frequently blushed with pink. When immature and until a very short time before ripening, the fruit is green, hard, gummy within and very astringent.

Next to the skin is a layer of somewhat granular flesh, (three-12.5 mm) thick, white, yellowish, light or dark pink, or near-red, juicy, acid, subacid, or sweet and flavourful. The central pulp is of uniform colour or slightly darker in tone and is juicy and normally filled with very hard, yellowish seeds, though some rare types have soft, chewable seeds.

Actual seed counts have ranged from 112 to 535 but some guavas are seedless or nearly so. In T&T, guava fruits are a primary host of the Caribbean fruit fly which can make ripe fruits inedible. As children, eating guavas with worms (immature stage of fruit fly) was not uncommon.

The entire fruit is a key ingredient in fruit punch, and the juice is often used in culinary sauces (hot or cold), as well as artisan candies, dried snacks, fruit bars, desserts. In many countries, guava is eaten raw, typically cut into quarters or eaten like an apple, whereas in other countries it is eaten with a pinch of salt and pepper, cayenne powder or a mix of spices (masala). Guava juice and nectar is popular in many countries and fruits are also often prepared in fruit salads.

Guava contains a high level of pectin used in food preparations as a gelling agent, particularly in jams and jellies. It is also used in fillings, medicines, sweets and as a stabiliser in fruit juices and milk drinks. Green mature guavas can be utilised as a source of pectin, yielding somewhat more and higher quality pectin than ripe fruits. Guavas are extensively used to make candies, preserves, jellies, jams, and marmalades. Here in T&T, guavas are used to make guava jelly, jam and guava cheese.

Guavas are rich in dietary fibre and vitamins C, B (with moderate levels of folic acid) and A. Guavas also contain flavonoids like beta-carotene, lycopene, lutein and cryptoxanthin and therefore it is considered to be a “superfruit.” Having a generally broad, low-calorie profile of essential nutrients, a single guava fruit contains about four times the amount of vitamin C as an orange. 

Guava seeds remain viable for many months and often germinate in two to three weeks but may take as long as eight weeks. Pretreatment such as boiling for five minutes or soaking for two weeks, will hasten germination. In as much as guava trees cannot be depended upon to come true from seed, vegetative propagation is widely practiced.

Since ripe guava fruit are a chief source of food for birds and animals, in many parts of the world, guava runs wild and forms extensive thickets called “guayabales” in Spanish–and it overruns pastures, fields and roadsides so vigorously in Hawaii, Malaysia, New Caledonia, Fiji, the US Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Cuba and southern Florida that it is classed as a noxious weed (or an invasive species) subject to eradication. In Tobago, along the road crossing the Main Ridge, numerous guava trees can be seen; it is a favourite food of the Cocrico.

Nevertheless, wild guavas have constituted the bulk of the commercial supply. In 1972, Hawaii processed, for domestic use and export, more than 2,500 tons (2,274 MT) of guavas, over 90 per cent from wild trees. During the period of high demand in World War II, the wild guava crop in Cuba was said to be 10,000 tons (9,000 MT), and over 6,500 tons (6,000 MT) of guava products were exported.

Food for Thought/Grow and Eat Local seeks to inform about the 149 crops that are grown in T&T (not counting the varieties within many of them) which are depicted on two charts with a photo of each crop in alpha order giving the local and scientific names and were sponsored by First Citizens. The model has been duplicated in Barbados, St Lucia and St Vincent and efforts are underway to do so in Jamaica and Guyana. Copies have been distributed to all schools and libraries. Information regarding their availability: email fruitstt@live.com

Visit the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries’ website at 
http://www.agriculture.gov.tt/

This series is written in collaboration with Cynthra Persad, retired director of Research, Ministry of Agriculture.

Guava Cheese

INGREDIENTS
Butter for greasing dish
1 lb of granulated sugar
1 lb of guava pulp (no seeds)
1” stick of cinnamon spice. 

METHOD
• Guavas must be firm. Peel the guavas and pick out all of the seeds. 
• Use a fine sieve to pass the guava flesh through. 
• Now place the guava pulp, spice with sugar in a heavy duty skillet, use pot with a heavy bottom and cook on high until mixture starts to "jump" stirring once in a while. 
• Reduce heat then cook the mixture, stirring constantly, with an up and over motion till the mixture is thick and separates very easily from bottom and the sides of the pot leaving the pot clean. 
Note: To test put a drop of mixture on a saucer. It should form a ball that can be rolled around. In a greased fireproof glass dish pour in guava cheese and let it cool. Cut the guava cheese in small size squares, when it’s cooled off.

Guava Jam

INGREDIENTS
3 cups guavas, peeled and quartered
4 cups sugar
2 limes juiced
1 package liquid pectin

METHOD
• Add guavas, sugar and lime juice into a medium saucepan and add water until the guavas are covered.
• Boil and reduce heat and let simmer for 30 minutes.
• Use blender to break up guava mixture. Once blended, strain through a fine mesh sieve or a cheese cloth.
• Put the strained mixture back in the saucepan, add the pouch of pectin and let boil. When boiling, reduce heat and let simmer for another 20 minutes or until thickened.
• Remove from heat, and pour into sterilised jars and seal. The jam will continue to thicken while cooling.

Food and Description Values per 100g
Calcium (mg)    Iron (mg)    Potassium (mg)    Sodium (mg)    Zinc (mg)    Vit.A    Thiamin (mg)    Riboflavin (mg)    Niacin (mg)    Total Folacin (µg)    Cyano Cobalamin (µg)    Vit. C
Breadfruit Fresh    20    0.3    284    3    0.2    79    0.05    0.5    1.2    184
Cooked, boiled    20    0.6    25    0.01    0.04    0.5    72

It may seem strange but it’s true, many psychologists rank the event of a wedding among the top ten anxiety-producing life events such as: death of a loved one, divorce or the loss of a job! That’s right, taking the plunge, as rewarding as it is, can often mean diving head first into a number of pre-wedding entanglements. Here are some of the sources of pre-wedding “blues.”

Cold feet—We’ve all heard those dreadful, shocking stories about “run-away brides” and grooms who never show up to the altar and hope these things never happen to us or any of our friends. In most cases, those actions are the typical “last-straw reactions” in a relationship which happen out of fear, insecurity and indecision. If you are feeling this way and have nagging doubts that refuse to go away, you should seek pre-marital counselling or chat with other engaged brides/grooms who might be going through the same feelings.

The laws of in-laws—Marriage brings you a wonderful spouse but your spouse brings his/her family tree along too! The reason someone doesn’t hand you an “in-law manual” when you get engaged is that each type of son/daughter-in-law relationship is different. Some couples have an easy transition if the two sets of families share things in common.

On the flip side though, some couples battle for years with their in-laws. Remember that this is a new relationship with expectations from both parties. If you want a successful marriage, you may have to get to know your in-laws, participate in their family traditions, and tactfully establish boundaries with them for respect and privacy. That’s quite a handful…and it doesn’t happen overnight! The key is that time really does make a difference, in terms of how well they understand you and how you relate to them.

 Abode anxiety—Should we rent? Stay at our in-laws’ place? Invest in a property? 
Apart from the time-consuming wedding planning, these are questions that cannot be left unanswered. Deciding on an option simply depends on what you can afford and where you see yourself in the future. Some couples rent or stay at in-laws to save for their dream home.

Other couples are able to invest in a home or rent an apartment immediately. Regarding living arrangements, though, it’s important to be comfortable in your surroundings and at ease with your decision (mentally and financially), since what may work for one couple may not work for the other. A good idea is to consult a financial planner for help. 

The two-week stress fest—Grooms-to-be often watch as their fiancées morph into obsessing, panic-stricken creatures during the two weeks before the wedding. Be gentle on her, most of the wedding stresses typically fall on the bride. She will worry whether she will look her best on the day, whether all her delicately timed mini events will come together perfectly, whether her guests will have a good time, and whether she will finish packing for her honeymoon!

To ease stress, go off on a retreat together for half a day (away from wedding planning) or get a massage (highly recommended the day before the wedding!)

 A good way to deal with the stressors of planning and pre-wedding jitters is to place co-ordinating duties in the hands of a professional wedding planner. This doesn’t have to be an expensive option, you can hire a wedding consultant for just one or two problem areas or a wedding co-ordinator to assist on the day. Remember that planners are there not only to ease your stress and save you time but can also be your personal diplomat for difficult relatives or members of bridal party, scheduler, budget controller, negotiator, organizer and creative expert!

To find wedding professionals, you can visit www.trinidadweddings.com/directory

Archaeological evidence suggests that in the area known as Perriman Corner, Delhi Road, Fyzabad, a settlement of Amerindian peoples existed as far back as 350 AD. The coming of Europeans in the 16th century may not have impacted them since there is nothing to indicate that the community lasted into the colonial period.

The district became part of the Ward of Oropouche in the County of St Patrick under the local government system established by Governor Lord Harris in 1849. Heavily forested and of rugged geography, it was not cultivated until the 1860s when some indentured Indian immigrants whose contracts had expired, settled on the fringes of the Oropouche Lagoon in the area known today as Avocat and here, cultivated rice, vegetables and ground provisions . 

The village itself was founded in 1875 by the Rev Dr Kenneth Grant of the Presbyterian Church’s Canadian Mission to the Indians (CMI). As part of the conversion process of the CMI, Rev Grant arranged for a number of former indentured immigrants (who had served their five-and ten-year contracts on sugar estates in Oropouche and Rousillac) to settle on ten-acre blocks in an area where there were lands suitable for cocoa cultivation and rice production.

In paying homage to India, the settlement became known as Fyzabad. A chapel and day school were established first on the junction of the path that later was called Delhi Road and the bridle track that connected the settlement to St Mary’s Village, Oropouche which was then a small town and the location of the district court, warden’s office and police station.

Gradually, a mixture of ethnicities settled in the area including a few Chinese merchants. Cocoa was king, and almost every substantial resident of Fyzabad owned cocoa lands which covered the Delhi Road, Guapo Road and Oropouche Road. A description of the multitude of people in Fyzabad was written in 1912 by H M Saville as follows:

“On our way back we passed through a small settlement called Fyzabad, a name which clearly denotes the origin of many of its inhabitants. While waiting in the buggy until Mr Fitzwilliam had transacted some business here, I was interested in watching the school-children as they passed, and a more mixed lot I never saw. Some were coloured in all shades from nearly white to nearly black, many were East Indians, some were even Chinese, to say nothing of other combinations of these different strains. A few of the best mannered ones spoke to me as they passed. Most of these were East Indians, by race if not by birth; while, however, there was no foreign accent in their nicely pronounced salutation, “Good morning, sir,” there was something decidedly foreign in their manner, a kind of retiring diffidence not often found in these democratic days, even among negro children, who readily assimilate English manners.”

The purely agrarian nature of Fyzabad was to make a dramatic about-face in the early years of the 20th century. As early as 1910, a number of prospectors led by Arthur Beeby-Thompson began prospecting lands near the village in the area known as Forest Reserve as part of a larger survey begun some years earlier in the Guapo-Vessigny region to determine the presence of large oil deposits.

The initial exploration in the latter district was marred by some controversy in the acquisition of leases from estate owners (in those days, it was legally possible for landowners to retain all mineral rights except those for coal and gold and these could be sold or leased). It appears that a relationship developed between the oil men and Thomas Geddes Grant, a commission agent and the son of the Rev Dr Kenneth Grant to whom Fyzabad owed its establishment.

The younger Grant quietly began acquiring leases from the cocoa proprietors in areas indicated as being potentially rich in oil. In order to save the expense of purchasing the land outright, only the mineral rights were bought for a fraction of the value of the oil that would later be extracted from the properties. Grant was to sit on the board of directors of the resulting Apex Oilfields (one of the largest oil companies in Trinidad when incorporated in 1919) until his death in the 1930s.  

Simultaneously, another syndicate was leasing lands in Forest Reserve from the colonial government. This company became known in 1913 as Trinidad Leaseholds Ltd and operated a refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre as well. The oil age had begun in Fyzabad and it was to change both the physical and social atmosphere forever. 

“They don’t make ‘em like they used to,” as the idiom goes. So it would seem for the Centennial Light. An astonishing, record-setting 115 years after someone first flipped it on, this light bulb is still faintly shining in a fire station in Livermore, California. (You can see it for yourself on a webcam that refreshes every 30 seconds.)

For the multiple generations of us who have since swapped out more burned-out light bulbs than we can remember, the Centennial Bulb’s longevity must seem like a slap in the face. Surely, if an incandescent bulb made with 19th Century technology can last so long, why not new-fangled, 20th and even 21st Century bulbs?

The Centennial Light is often pointed to as evidence for the supposedly sinister business strategy known as planned obsolescence. Lightbulbs and various other technologies could easily last for decades, many believe, but it’s more profitable to introduce artificial lifespans so that companies get repeat sales. “That’s sort of the conspiracy theory of planned obsolescence,” says Mohanbir Sawhney, a professor of marketing at Northwestern University.

So is this conspiracy theory true? Does planned obsolescence really exist?

The answer: yes, but with caveats. Beyond the crude caricature of greedy companies wantonly fleecing their customers, the practice does have silver linings. To an extent, planned obsolescence is an inevitable consequence of sustainable businesses giving people goods they desire. In this way, planned obsolescence serves as a reflection of a ravenous, consumer culture which industries did create for their benefit, yet were hardly alone in doing so. 

“Fundamentally, firms are reacting to the tastes of the consumers,” says Judith Chevalier, a professor of finance and economics at Yale University. “I think there are some avenues where (businesses) are kind of tricking the consumer, but I think there are also situations where I might put the fault on the consumer.”

An illuminating example

Sticking with light bulbs as a product, they provide amongst the most emblematic case studies of planned obsolescence.

Thomas Edison invented commercially viable light bulbs circa 1880. These early, incandescent bulbs—the Centennial Light included—relied on carbon filaments rather than the tungsten that came into widespread use almost 30 years later. (Part of the reason the Centennial Light has persevered so long, scientists speculate, is because its carbon filament is eight times thicker and thus more durable than the thin, metal wires in later incandescent bulbs.)

Initially, companies installed and maintained whole electrical systems to support bulb-based lighting in the dwellings of the new technology’s rich, early adopters. 

Seeing as consumers were not on the hook to pay for replacement units, lighting companies therefore sought to produce light bulbs which lasted as long as possible, according to Collector’s Weekly.  

The business model changed, however, as the light bulb customer base grew more mass-market. Greater sums of money could be reaped, companies figured, by making bulbs disposable and putting replacement costs onto customers. 

Thus was born the infamous “Phoebus cartel” in the 1920s, wherein representatives from top light bulb manufacturers worldwide, such as Germany’s Osram, the United Kingdom’s Associated Electrical Industries, and General Electric (GE) in the United States (via a British subsidiary), colluded to artificially reduce bulbs’ lifetimes to 1,000 hours. The details of the scam emerged decades later in governmental and journalistic investigations.

“This cartel is the most obvious example” of planned obsolescence’s origins “because those papers have been found,” says Giles Slade, author of the book Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, a history of the strategy and its consequences.

The practice cropped up in all sorts of other industries, too. For instance, competition between General Motors and Ford in the fledging 1920s auto market led the former to introduce the now-familiar model year changes in its vehicles. GM had pioneered a way to entice customers to splurge on the latest, greatest car, to satisfy themselves and impress those in their social circles. “It was a model for all industry,” says Slade.

Although the term “planned obsolescence” didn’t enter common usage until the 1950s, the strategy had by then permeated consumerist societies.

Alive and well

In various forms, from subtle to unsubtle, planned obsolescence still very much exists nowadays. From so-called contrived durability, where brittle parts give out, to having repairs cost more than replacement products, to aesthetic upgrades that frame older product versions as less stylish—goods makers have no shortage of ruses to keep opening customers’ wallets.

For a fully modern example, consider smartphones. These handsets often get discarded after a mere couple years’ use. Screens or buttons break, batteries die, or their operating systems, apps, and so on can suddenly no longer be upgraded. Yet a solution is always near at hand: brand new handset models, pumped out every year or so, and touted as “the best ever”.

As another example of seemingly blatant planned obsolescence, Slade mentions printer cartridges. Microchips, light sensors or batteries can disable a cartridge well before all its ink is actually used up, forcing owners to go buy entirely new, not-at-all-cheap units. 

“There’s no real reason for that,” Slade says. “I don’t know why you can’t just go get a bottle of cyan or black [ink] and, you know, squirt it into a reservoir.”

Taken this way, planned obsolescence looks wasteful. According to Cartridge World, a company that recycles printer cartridges and offers cheaper replacements, in North America alone, 350 million (not even empty) cartridges end up in landfills annually. 

Beyond waste, all that extra manufacturing can degrade the environment too.

A nuanced view

Though some of these examples of planned obsolescence are egregious, it’s overly simplistic to condemn the practice as wrong. 

On a macroeconomic scale, the rapid turnover of goods powers growth and creates reams of jobs—just think of the money people earn by manufacturing and selling, for instance, millions of smartphone cases. 

Furthermore, the continuous introduction of new widgets to earn (or re-earn) new and old customers’ dough alike will tend to promote innovation and improve the quality of products.

As a result of this vicious, yet virtuous cycle, industry has made countless goods cheap and thus available to nearly anyone in wealthy Western countries, the Far East, and increasingly so in the developed world. Many of us indulge in creature comforts unimaginable a century ago.

“There’s no doubt about it,” says Slade, “more people have had a better quality of life as a result of our consumer model than at any other time in history. Unfortunately, it’s also responsible for global warming and toxic waste.”

Oftentimes, planned obsolescence isn’t nakedly exploitative, as it benefits both the consumer and the manufacturer. Chevalier points out that companies tailor the durability of their goods per customer’s needs and expectations. For instance: children’s clothing. 

“Who buys super durable clothes for their kids?” Chevalier asks. Depending on their age, children might grow out of their clothes sometimes in mere months. It’s not so bad, then, that the clothes might relatively easily stain, tear, or go out of style, so long as they’re inexpensive.  

The same argument can apply to consumer electronics. Relentless innovation and competition for market share means that the underlying technologies in smartphones, for instance, keep surging ahead, with faster processors, better cameras, and so on.

“If ever there was true obsolescence, it’s in technology,” says Howard Tullman, a serial entrepreneur and chief executive officer of 1871, a digital startup incubator. “It’s almost as if the technology takes care of itself—this will obsolete itself whether you like it or not.”

Many owners might therefore appreciate paying less for a smartphone upfront whose, say, batteries can no longer hold a useful charge in three years. 

“Because the technology is evolving so rapidly, many people are not going to value the extra lifespan of a more durable battery,” says Chevalier.

A revealing counter-perspective to this nexus of customer desire and affordability mediated by planned obsolescence is the luxury goods market. 

Customers will opt to pay a substantial premium for products that often have finer craftsmanship, greater durability, and resale value—heck, many luxury goods consumers expect their investment to increase in value over time, instead of falling apart and being eventually rubbished. 

“If you buy a Rolex, you know it’s going to last you and you expect to be able to drive a truck over it,” says Slade.

Of course, people don’t just binge on a Rolex so it’ll be the last watch they or their grandchildren ever need to buy. To varying degrees, high-end brands serve to stroke clients’ egos as symbols of elevated social status. 

“Luxury goods are socially coded,” says Slade. As the years go by, though, hallmarks of a luxury version of an item can work their way into the mass market as their production grows cheaper and customers come to expect the perks. 

Few would argue that the increased availability of safety devices, like air bags in cars, once only found in pricier models, has not been a net positive. So in its admittedly self-interested, halting way, the competition at the heart of planned obsolescence-influenced capitalism can work in looking out for consumer’s interests as well.

The future of obsolescence

Accordingly, though examples clearly exist to the contrary, some business academics feel that it’s a bit over the top to assume many companies sit around plotting how to precisely engineer a product to self-destruct.

“If you have a market that’s kind of competitive, then the expected lifespan of the product is certainly something the firms compete over,” says Chevalier. “For a lot of products it’s not like consumers aren’t savvy enough to try to choose products that won’t (soon) be obsolete.”

Indeed, there are forces that could encourage manufacturers to lengthen lifespans.

In the auto market, Chevalier says “everybody thinks about and looks up how quickly does this car depreciate relative to others”. Indeed, in this arena, cars now stay on the road longer than they once did.  

“The auto industry for years has been sort of a fashion-driven business, where your car had fins and five years later, fins were out of style,” says Tullman. 

Yet that’s changing: he cites United States Department of Transportation figures showing that the average age of a passenger vehicle on the road in that country now stands at 11.4 years; in 1969, the figure was 5.1 years.

With Internet reviews, it’s easier than ever to find out if your intended purchase has a short lifespan—and that goes for lightbulbs as well as cars.

And as environmental consciousness of the terrible amounts of waste generated by a throwaway culture has risen, consumer goods might become less disposable. 

Google’s Project Ara, for instance, is developing a smartphone-like device with six slots for swapping out technologically outdated components, versus traditionally binning the entirety of an aging smartphone.  

A business-minded approach to smarter recycling, reuse and repurposing has arguably made a big dent and will so in future, says Sawhney. For instance, Tesla, the electric automobile manufacturer, has plans to take back the spent batteries in its clients’ cars and repurpose them for home energy storage. 

The company also auto-downloads and upgrades the software in its clients’ cars as the vehicles charge overnight. Sawhney, who is a Tesla owner, says the company planned ahead for these sorts of upgrades by including “basically future-proof” sensors and hardware in the vehicle. 

“Instead of selling model after model of the car to me, (Tesla) just changed the software,” Sawhney says. “So that’s an antidote to planned obsolescence in a way—it makes obsolescence obsolete.”

She’s a fit grandmother, a trained salvage scuba diver, and a Rear Admiral in the US Navy. She is also the current director of the Washington DC-based Inter-American Defense College, a place where high-level military men, police and senior government officials from South America and the region go to learn more about the “political, economic, psychosocial and military factors of power.” So it’s safe to say that Rear Admiral Martha Herb is no shrinking violet—even though she has a gentle Southern lilt to her voice. 

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Martha Herb’s sense of adventure and purpose led her into a career very unconventional for women in the 1970s. At first she studied for an arts degree in English and French, and began teaching school. But then she visited a recruiter’s office, where the sight of an exciting diving photograph spoke to her.

“My mother suggested that I join the military. So I went into the recruiter’s office, and I saw a magazine cover with a Navy diver on the front. So I looked at the recruiter and I said: ‘I want to do that.’ I had never dived, but I was a nationally ranked swimmer and very comfortable in the water. He goes: ‘Well they’ve just opened it up for women.’”

Commissioned through Officer Training School in 1979, Herb soon became one of the first three women officers to graduate from the Naval School of Diving and Salvage in Washington DC as a Diving and Salvage officer. She also became a Surface Warfare officer, whose responsibility is to ensure Navy ships operate smoothly.

She served on active duty in diving commands in the early 80s, before transferring to the Reserve Component in 1983 in order to start a family with her husband, who was also a Navy salvage diver. She later completed five command tours, did support work in NATO for a US military delegation, achieved Flag rank in 2010, and served in Afghanistan as chief of the Military Technical Agreement Branch, on the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

As she paced in an upstairs lobby last Thursday, speaking crisply into a cellphone, her fair hair framing a face that’s lined with experience, Herb seemed self-possessed, confident and forthright, a person accustomed to both leadership and teamwork. 

Women in Military & Security Conference 
Herb was visiting T&T for the Women in Military & Security Conference held June 13-17, where she was both a guest speaker and an attentive listener to experts and representatives from US partner nations from as far north as Canada to as far south as Uruguay. Co-hosted by the US Southern Command (which is based in Florida, one of nine combat groups in the US Department of Defense) and the T&T Defence Force, the goal of the conference was to support new initiatives on the advancement of women in regional military and security forces. 

Herb said all women in male dominated military and security jobs face common, at times challenging experiences. 

“You have people who don’t want to accept you. You have the old dinosaurs who go: ‘Women can’t do that. They belong in the home, or taking care of babies,’ or ‘They’re limited.’ And then you have those people who have been exposed to women who can do it all. And they go: ‘Ok, they can do it. And this is really about all of us being an equal force in getting the mission done.’ And so you just persevere, no matter what hiccups you come up against.”

She said it was important for women to not only be self-motivated, but to recognise their own talents. Historically, a small number of women have always fought in wars, often in disguise as men. During the two World Wars, many women worked as nurses, cleaners, cooks and clerical staff for the armed forces. And many also worked in munitions plants for war industries, and in various resistance movements. But the idea of women in combat has been controversial. In the US, it was not until 1976 that the first group of women was admitted. 

Today, according to January 2015 data on a US Department of Defense webpage, there are more than 200,000 US women now in active duty military positions (about 15 per cent of the US active duty force of 1.4 million). Ninety per cent of US military jobs are now open to women, and about 16 per cent of US officer corps are women, including Navy admirals and US Army and Air Force generals. So the armed forces provide viable career options for some women.

US military spending
Diverse career options for women exist in the US military in part because of the large size and funding of the US armed forces, which consists of the Army, Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard. 

In 2016, the United States will spend an annual budget of about US $602 billion to fund its base defence and war operations, according to a June 14, 2016 article by Joe Gould, posted on the Defense News website (www.defensenews.com). Gould was reporting on the US Senate's recent approval of the annual defence bill, pending any veto by US President Obama. 

The US accounted for 37 per cent of the world's total military expenditure of US$1.6 trillion in 2015, according to data from the National Priorities Project. So US industries of defence, warfare and related military technologies are an important part of that country's economy. 

War is big business. Companies like Lockheed Martin (makes the F-35 strike fighter plane), Boeng (helicopters, drones, strike aircraft fighters, missiles), Northrup Gruman (drones, cyber security), General Dynamics (battle tanks, ships, munitions, communications systems, nuclear-powered Navy submarines), Hewlett-Packard (defence communications—Navy Marine Corps Internet), and many other firms all benefit from US government contracts and arms sales, according to a 2012 Business Insider article listing the top 25 defence firms in the US.

Learning from the bottom up
All this funding is good news for US women keen on military careers, who have the skills and tenacity to benefit from the US military system. For Rear Admiral Martha Herb, a Navy career was attractive, and she started out more than 30 years ago literally below the bottoms of ships, using her dive salvage training.

“Ship’s husbandry was my specialty—kind of like (being) a car mechanic below the waterline,” she said,  last Thursday, laughing. “So I had wonderful jobs like cleaning systems, propeller screw changes, cleaning the bottoms of ships—patches and plugs.”

“Salvage work is about mishaps at sea,” she explained. “It can be recovering ships, it can be recovering the black boxes from planes, it can be body recovery.” 

“The industry has changed very much within the US Navy since I first came in. So where we had a number of salvage ships and we were able to have our own ships to deploy on and do that kind of work, (now) it’s morphed into a different community—the ships are now in MSC—Military Sealift Command—and so there’s a lot of commercial seamen and contracts involved,” said Herb.

On the lighter side, though, diving has taken her to some unusual places.

“I’ve done some work with National Parks Services, diving on wrecks. I dove on the Arizona and the Utah with the BBC. That was a lot of fun. I’ve done ice diving with the Canadians. And some underwater archaeology.”

Has Herb ever had conflicts of conscience between her early training as an educator, and her later role as an officer of warfare? 

“Not at all. Your life’s a tapestry. You get different colours at different points ...and they don’t quite make sense. But then … it creates a beautiful picture and you see how it all has come together. So: an educator early on, then diving and salvage with the Navy. I transitioned to the Reserves when I had children... Then I got a doctorate in education specialising in counselling of military families...That helped when I went to Afghanistan; it became a wonderful asset to have just in talking with our troops, listening to people’s stories, helping them resolve the difficulty of being in a war zone.”

“We have an obligation to provide for our societies and to give them a safe environment where they can excel, where they can have the opportunities, where they can create, where they can innovate. There’s not a lot of people who will volunteer to do that mission. And so I have been gifted, and it’s up to me to use every asset that I have to its fullest potential. And for me, it’s involved not only doing the military mission at peace, but also at war.”

As Director of the Inter-American Defense College, Herb encounters many leading influencers in Central America, South America and the Caribbean. The IADC operates under the Organisation of American States (founded 1948 by the US) and the Inter-American Defense Board. The IADC’s flagship service is an 11-month graduate programme to provide training and critical thinking skills for senior military and government officials through a study of governmental systems, international relations, and regional security issues.

When she is not hard at work, however, Rear Admiral Herb’s greatest delight is her family. “I have two wonderful children, a wonderful husband, I have a family, which is very, very important to me, and I have two grandchildren and a third on the way. And so that’s probably the most exciting thing I do. At this point in my career, that’s refreshing. Because you see this is a new generation—and it’s their turn.” 

Last week, a friend of mine was killed. He died of multiple gunshot wounds. In the curious world that is modern digital interaction, this was a person I shared messages with, responding to Facebook chat requests roughly once every four months.

We shared a first name, and he would sometimes initiate his chats with a reference to the “tech savvy” Mark.

We last exchanged typewritten words on June 6, and his last words to me after an exchange about what we were doing right then (I was exhausted after a long day of teaching and working on a leader for the paper) “Don’t get yourself worked up. You’ll stress out yourself.”

It was seven minutes to nine. I scrolled through a list of hundreds of messages on Saturday and Sunday, tracing a thread of intermittent conversations over the course of the last four years, beginning on April 19, 2012 with a cavalier “Hey.”

He claimed to be a reader of this column and that carried our early text chats past some rocky points. Telling a writer that you read his regular output is rather like saying, “I validate your life and purpose on the planet.”

Our first exchanges of words almost crashed to a halt on the poorly concealed indifference and polite apathy I bring to conversations with strangers on Facebook.

“Your introduction was poor,” he wrote in that first exchange of words. 

“I came at you with excitement and you were like, um okay! Ppl add ppl to become friends.”

I acknowledged his remonstrance, and we began again. It wouldn’t be the first time he brought me up short, yet not once in that four years did I speak to this young man, nor did I ever meet him in person.

Most of the reason for that is on me. I rarely initiate contact with anyone on Facebook. 

I’ve made friends through social media, real world acquaintances who now align with the presence that we normally associate with the term. Yet, the idea of a friend now seems quaint in a world in which threads of bits link people, agendas and intent into a web of engagement that offers the verisimilitude of a real connection.

I found out about the young man’s death from a mutual friend on Facebook, someone who had stepped from the phosphor glow of the computer screen and the friendly impersonality of a profile picture to actually meet the young man.

What he shared with me about his encounters offered a pivot on some of those conversations that I’d suspected but never engaged.

My Facebook profile is a curious thing, and it’s one that annoys and frustrates people who know me from the meat world.

I share very little that’s truly personal, share nothing about my family and take liberal positions on most controversial matters, inclusive of gender equality and same-sex debates.

As a consequence, some folks fill that vacuum of information with their own assumptions and I’ve had to gently steer some private conversations from an incorrect reading of my own, personal gender preference.

Based on my conversation with our mutual friend, that may have been a consideration in the occasional frustrations I stirred in our late friend, but there’s no way to ever know that now.

As I scroll through four years of messages, I’m struck by the comedy of errors they misrepresent. The false starts, aborted discussions, abrupt truncations of exchanges, the efforts to connect and find some type of mutual ground that never seemed to go anywhere.

It’s like a text-based comedy of doors, a farce with an indeterminate point to make and a subtext of Kafka, forever restarting itself and trailing off in misunderstandings and petulance.

I look back at all this and in a very 21st century way, this dead person was my friend in all the ways that mattered. He constantly tried to understand me and what I was doing, asked for advice and persevered even when it seemed that nothing about our exchanges was going anywhere.

He was far more patient than many of my real friends, but he is a digital ghost. I know his face only from his profile pictures, which will never change again. I understand him only through his Sisyphean effort to push our engagement up the hill of my patient deflections.

And now it’s over. 

All that’s left now are words, circling each other without landing, their tiny black characters scrolling down my screen like corbeau with nothing to feast on.

A Jamaican immigrant who co-founded the Notting Hill Carnival and became the first black mayor of the London borough of Southwark died over the weekend.

Sam King MBE sailed to the UK on the Empire Windrush in 1948. In 1964 he started a Caribbean street festival that grew into Notting Hill Carnival—Europe’s biggest street party. He was elected mayor of Southwark in 1983. A war veteran, he was also a driving force behind Britain’s first black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette.

King died on Saturday aged 90, his family said. The 90-year-old had been unwell in recent months and passed away with his family around him.

Born in 1926, Sam King first came to Britain after volunteering for the Royal Air Force as an engineer in 1944, after spotting an advert in the local paper. In a BBC interview last year, he said he had “left Portland, Jamaica, in temperatures of 75ºF (23ºC).” When he arrived in Britain the temperature was 39ºF (4ºC): “I thought I was going to die.”

After returning to Britain on the MV Windrush and settling in Southwark, he found work as a postman and became an active campaigner in the community. In the mid 1950s he became circulation manager of the Brixton-based Gazette. He later helped organise the first Caribbean-style carnival in London which later became the first Notting Hill Carnival in 1964.

Tributes have been paid to Mr King with many calling him a “pioneer” in British politics. Speaking to BBC Radio London, Labour MP Diane Abbott said Mr King was a “very dignified and very gentlemanly” person who helped break down barriers for black people in politics.

“Someone like myself who was fortunate to become an MP stands on the shoulders of people like Sam King,” she said.

Southwark Councillor Michael Situ tweeted that the World War Two veteran was “principled, inspiring and always willing to serve.”

BBC

Tolerance is my belaboured point. If you’ve ever heard someone say of another in Trini parlance, “I cyah stand she, nuh. I does only tolerate she,” I wonder, what comes to mind? Or in fact have you ever used those or similar words to describe someone you know or have encountered?

Further, have you ever been guilty of hating someone you possibly never even met but have heard some story or scenario and carry the bad feelings as if it were one of personal injury? 

Only recently I had to listen to someone with whom I was travelling espouse such ill feelings about what they “know” of the personal life and choice of a local personality. I took time to enquire if that was based on an encounter they had and was (unsurprisingly) told they had never even met the individual.

What exactly does the term “tolerate” mean or suggest in the former scenario? 

Last week’s definition of tolerance read “to accept behaviour and beliefs that are different from your own, although you might not agree with or approve of them: to deal with something unpleasant or annoying, or to continue existing despite bad or difficult conditions (dictionary.cambridge.org). 

To tolerate according to Miriam-Webster Dictionary “suggests overcoming or successfully controlling an impulse to resist, avoid, or resent something injurious or distasteful,” and stand, as a synonym of tolerate emphasises even more strongly “the ability to bear without discomposure or flinching.”

Generally, we say we cannot “stand” people who are different from us and with whom we have encountered an acute difference of opinion. Or sometimes, for no real reason—what Trinis call “just so”—your “blood does not take a person.” You strike some discordant note and either have not thought of it long enough to make a determination of the real emotions or, again in Trini behaviour, you choose to hide your true feelings behind a nebulous statement.

But what is it we are saying really, when we use some of those expressions to describe our feelings toward people we do not love or like? Is it that we hate them but find it more palatable to use our culturally imprecise language to express our hateful feelings about that person?

I have had those feelings and to a lesser extent they still enter my consciousness but because of my maturity and willingness to change and to embrace everyone as equal, I am more conscious of them and more tempered too, in my response to others. While I am sufficiently gregarious, I am unable to manage and accept every personality that I encounter, yet, I constantly guard my heart with respect to adverse feelings about and towards others.

I am blessed with an extremely forgiving heart and because I do not pretend, I am able to treat with a person or a situation frankly, openly, quickly and austerely and walk away with no lingering feelings of ill will. It is a behaviour I desired from my youth and learned eventually to embrace it as part of my personal ethos in treating with people.

I do not like the baggage of “bad blood.” I simply feel that life’s challenges are already so weighty for me to decide to tote intolerance and hatred towards others along my journey. But my manner of dealing with a situation quickly and moving on “normal, normal” confuses people. 

That is especially so because we somehow have learned to hold on to anger, angst, vexation, hatred, and ill will long enough to justify our holding out on forgiveness, tolerance and love even, when we come into conflict with others.

I have already accepted that I would not be liked or loved by everyone. In that vein, I have already decided that I would not labour the point of hanging around hoping that the intolerance I see, know and experience in your conduct towards me would change.

The pretence thing does not work well with me either. I simply cannot do the “pure hate and acting normal.” I would not subject myself to spaces or conversations or communities that wish to exclude me, and especially since I am a vulnerable target for all kinds of prejudices having decided to walk/talk openly about my invisible disability.

My wish though, is still more tolerance from others. Each of us have issues that can cause others to hate us and just “tolerate” us rather than show true tolerance. 

But for those who live with mental illnesses and disorders, whose battle with self is even more forceful than any with others, whose own mind rallies against the very peace that the heart creates, whose body resists the effort of our minds, tolerance—the tangible version—is the hope in which we live. We wish that more people would control the impulse to resist, avoid, or resent what they deem injurious or distasteful in us.

—Caroline C Ravello is a strategic communications and media practitioner with over 30 years of proficiency. She holds an MA in Mass Communications and is pursuing the MSc in Public Health (MPH) from the UWI. Write to: mindful.tt@gmail.com

Maria Arias slipped her notebooks into her backpack, scrounged for a banana to share with her brother and sister, and set off for high school through narrow streets so violent that taxis will not come here for any price. She hoped at least one teacher would show up.

But her 7 am art class was cancelled when the teacher called in sick. History class was suspended. There was no gym class because the coach had been shot dead weeks earlier. And in the afternoon, her Spanish teacher sent the students home early to meet a gang-imposed curfew.

“It’s a trap,” the slight 14-year-old with pink lipstick complained. “You risk your life to be here and end up waiting around for hours doing nothing. But you have to keep coming because it’s the only way out.”

The soaring crime and economic chaos stalking Venezuela are ripping apart a once-up-and-coming school system, robbing poor students such as Arias of any chance at a better life. Officially, Venezuela has cancelled 16 school days since December, including Friday classes because of an energy crisis.

In reality, Venezuelan children have missed an average of 40 per cent of class time, a parent group estimates, as a third of teachers skip work on any given day to wait in food lines. At Arias’ school, so many students have fainted from hunger that administrators told parents to keep underfed children home. And while the school locks its gate each morning, armed robbers still manage to break in and stick up kids between classes.

“This country has abandoned its children. By the time we see the full consequences, there will be no way to put it right,” Movement of Organised Parents spokesman Adelba Taffin said.

Until recently Venezuela’s schools were among the best in South America, and the late President Hugo Chavez made education a centrepiece of his socialist revolution. But in just a few years, the falling price of oil and underlying economic mismanagement have brought the country to its knees, along with many of its seven million public school students. Teachers are fleeing the country, the annual dropout rate has doubled, and more than a quarter of teenagers are not enrolled.

Arias’ 1,700-student school sits between a slum and what was once a middle-class neighbourhood in the capital, Caracas. Shortages are even more crippling outside Caracas, where schools shut down for weeks at a time.

Chatty and so studious her classmates call her “Wikipedia,” Arias started the year with dreams of becoming an accountant and moving to Paris. Her parents had saved up to buy her 12 new notebooks, one for each subject. Nine months later, most of the pages are still blank.

Her accounting teacher Betty Cubillan recently went missing for a week and a half. Cubillan says she comes to class as much as she can while hustling to get by on US$30 a month.

“If I don’t line up, I don’t eat. Who’s going to do it for me?” Cubillan said.

As many as 40 per cent of teachers skip class on any given day to wait in food lines, according to the Venezuela Teacher’s Federation. School director Helena Porras has asked nearby supermarkets to let teachers cut in line. And she’s disciplined staff for selling students passing grades in exchange for scarce goods like milk and flour.

But appeals to teachers’ sense of shame don’t go far in a country that has become one of the most violent and lawless in the world.

Arias has seen robberies, lootings and lynch mobs on her way to school. Workers lock a metal gate at the building’s sole entrance each day, but thugs still find ways in. Arias was once held up by a baby-faced boy who levelled a gun at her sister’s ribs and demanded the girls’ phones.

“I’m scared every day. Your heart leaps into your throat and you’re like, ‘Jeez, I thought a school was supposed to be safe,’” she said.

The school looks less like a place of education than a downtown bus terminal; grimy, smelling of urine, and full of people waiting for something that may not come.

Classrooms with puddles are used as emergency toilets now that the bathrooms have no running water. Students play dice on the cracked asphalt of the yard, trading insults and piles of bills. The patio was used for gym class until the teacher was killed in crossfire this spring while working a second job as a barber.

Arias’ parents worry most about boys; Venezuela now has the highest teen pregnancy rate in South America. The favourite make-out spot for students is behind a pile of 30,000 unopened textbooks from the government. Teachers decided they were too full of pro-socialist propaganda to use.

Arias and her friends drink water from home instead of eating lunch, since the new cafeteria never opened because there was no food or cooking gas. A quarter of Venezuelan children missed school this year because of hunger, according to the national research group Foundation Bengoa.

One recent morning, Arias’s mother asked her to leave art class because a store across town was selling flour. By the time Arias arrived, the stock already had run out. She raced back to school for her afternoon math exam, but the math teacher didn’t show up.

That night, Arias remarked bitterly that the metro is the cheapest thing you can buy in Caracas; if you pay for one ticket and throw yourself in front of a train, all your problems are over.

Parents say they struggle to guide teenagers through situations they find hard to accept themselves.

The father of a classmate, Roberly Bernal, began walking her to school every morning after a group of seniors threatened to stab her. Then, in April, he was murdered by a mob that accused him of stealing US$5.

Arias put off returning home when the school day ended. A classmate showed the girls a baby sparrow he’d grabbed out of a tree in the yard. “We should eat it,” he said.

Arias squealed with delight when the fluffy bird opened its wings. It was the first time she had laughed all day. AP

“How could you declare a national emergency for Zika when we have no cases of the virus in Trinidad?” asks UWI’s Prof Dave Chadee, one of the world’s foremost experts on mosquito-borne diseases and the Aedes aegypti mosquito. “That is an epidemiological problem and we really do need to sort out the situation with respect to hard evidence. If the virus is not present you cannot say there is a national emergency.” 

Prof Chadee was the Anthony N Sabga Caribbean Awards for Excellence (joint) laureate in Science & Technology in 2013. This is his response of the declaration of a national emergency by Minister of Health, Terrence Deyalsingh, in the wake of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the Zika as a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. 

Though the effects of the Zika virus are relatively mild, what has caused the mounting concern is its association with microcephaly, a condition whereby newborn babies of infected mothers have unusually small heads. The WHO release stressed that it “strongly suspected” a causal relationship between Zika and pregnant women and congenital and neurological problems. However, its release continued, there is as yet no scientific evidence to support the suspicion. 

This was Chadee’s thinking, and refers approvingly another UWI academic, Noel Kallicharan, whose letter was published in a newspaper last week, which said, among other things, that only six of the 270 confirmed cases of pregnant women who gave birth to microcephalic babies in had tested positive for the Zika virus. 

However, if Zika is not quite the plague it’s being made out to be, there are other reasons to worry about mosquito issues in Trinidad and the region. “What is really required,” continued Chadee, “is a decision being made about whether you’re talking about the virus, the risk of the disease coming to Trinidad, or is it a mosquito emergency. There is clearly a mosquito problem, and since there is no vaccine, the threat must be the mosquito Aedes aegypti.” 

This mosquito is also responsible for the transmission of dengue and chikungunya, which are endemic in T&T. Much of Chadee’s research has been directed at this mosquito. 

As it happens, the timing is on the side of public health authorities. Although, says Chadee, mosquito densities in T&T are unusually high, as we enter the dry season, those densities are set to decline sharply, by as much as 50 to 60 per cent, because of the simple drying up of the breeding sites. 

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What the emphasis should be on now, he says, is targeted source reduction: dealing with any receptacle or area which could contain the still water necessary for the mosquito to breed. “There must be a health education component. I’ve not seen that apart from the information on the news, which tells about the mosquito and the virus and how they’re transmitted,” he says.

The overarching problem, says Chadee, has nothing to do with the disease per se, but with the management of the Vector Control unit of the Ministry of Health. Chadee worked for a number of years in this unit before moving to academia.

“A lot of people in Vector Control know about this, and they should form part of the strategy of the ministry. This year marks 40 years since Vector Control has been given a mandate to reduce or eliminate vector densities, but it has not been done.” The reason, he says, is that “only in times of crisis are resources thrown at Vector Control, but it’s not done consistently.”

There is also the problem of changing proven strategies of mosquito control for new, seemingly ineffective strategies. An example is the WHO technique for reduction of mosquito populations by the introduction of a chemical, temephos, to water sources. This has been changed since last year. Now a product is used to create a thin film over water surfaces to prevent the larvae from breathing, But this can be dissipated by a single rainfall, whereas a treatment of temephos lasted four weeks.

Chadee’s advice to the public would be as follows:

1 Take action in and around their homes, and try and remove all the containers that are liable to breed mosquitoes.

2 People who have to store water can put temephos which is WHO recommended.

3 Cover water collectors, like drums or barrels and empty cans from the immediate living area.

4 Focus spraying efforts on the bedroom, since this is where mosquitoes are most likely to be. Walls should be sprayed, since it is there the mosquitoes sit before and after taking a meal from the host. Air conditioning units also help, but the temperature must be below 24 degrees

5 Use creams with DEET, which can be put on the skin to prevent bites.

These strategies will help the average person, but the government’s strategy should be coordinated to control source reduction on a larger scale. 

Source control is especially important as Chadee’s latest research (in a paper published in the journal Acta Tropica last year) suggests the mosquito problem is evolving. “Previously,” he says, “the breeding habitats of Aedes aegypti were relatively clean water. However, they’re adapting to the environment and, they’re going where they weren’t before, including sewers, pit latrines, and septic tanks.” 

His research has also revealed that mosquitoes can emerge, copulate and blood feed in total darkness. In that situation the life cycle is reduced by a couple of days. But if the mosquitoes go to underground environments, their life cycle gets faster.

More worryingly, in the wild, he discovered that mosquitoes were living more than 100 days, as opposed to the 30 days they are believed to survive. This raises a whole new set of problems, since a mosquito which survives 90 days will produce eggs and mosquitoes who are born transmitters. They will not have to feed off an infected person to acquire the virus to transmit.

To address these breeding and mosquito population control issues, Chadee is one of the pioneers of sterile male technique – where male mosquitoes are sterilised using radiation and released into the wild. He is going to China later this year to work on the sterilisation techniques, and has done work in Mauritius, Reunion and St Vincent.

Unfortunately, said Chadee, he has not been used or consulted by the government of T&T, despite it being UWI’s mandate to provide this sort of support to regional governments. “We are here and ready to help when asked,” he says.

INFO

A public lecture on mosquito borne disease given by Chadee in 2014, hosted by the ANSA Caribbean Awards and the City Corporation of San Fernando, is available for viewing on the Caribbean Awards YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/ANSCAFE. So is Prof Chadee’s biography and a studio interview from 2013.

A former national hockey player, 25-year-old Arielle Cowie is now aiming for the stars as a singer. A solo artiste, Cowie is doing her first major public performance on Saturday at the Fiesta Plaza, MovieTowne, Port-of-Spain, with its series of concerts—Discover Me—held monthly to showcase new and upcoming artistes.

“I have always been singing,” said Cowie. “As a child I sang with my primary school, Dunross Preparatory School in Westmoorings. I did music festival, the whole works. For some reason, after primary school and entering secondary school at Holy Name Convent, I went into a shell and concentrated on playing hockey.”

Cowie, a Capricorn, is the youngest of five children, with two brothers and two sisters. “As a child growing up in Diamond Vale, I had a great childhood,” said Cowie. “I was spoilt and always had my own way. I grew up in hockey. I played the game in primary school and got serious about it in secondary school. I eventually joined Ventures Hockey Club, the club my late mother, Caryl Cowie, was president of.

“I got a full scholarship to the Ohio State University in Columbus. It was a fantastic experience. At first, I was very nervous about it, especially as it was my first time residing away from home, not to mention not knowing anybody in Ohio. When I joined the university team, the girls and I just clicked beautifully. I spent four years at Ohio and actually captained the team in my last year.”

Missing family and friends in Trinidad, Cowie returned home in 2014. Now back on Trinidad soil, she decided to begin doing music. She said: “When I returned, it was a little bit slow to link with the people in the music industry. Last year, I made my debut on a big stage, playing Cinderella in the Baggasse Company stage production at Queen’s Hall.

“This just gave me a lot of confidence and made me realise that I could really pursue singing. Since then I have met so many people and I have been writing and in the studio producing music. I have been working with System 32 and Johann Seaton of Ultimate Rejects.”

Cowie’s favourite artiste is Beyonce mainly because of her “chameleon ability to change, not just physically, but the various veneers of her music.” 

Cowie composes her own material, described by her as “music that is always relatable,” pertaining to her personal experiences.

In an upbeat note about her Saturday night performance, she said: “It is going to be a fun night as I will have a really amazing band named Overdrive and my repertoire will comprise of several beautiful upbeat songs with some slow ballads as well. I will be singing songs for everyone.”

On July 9, Alta will host its first blood drive at the head office in Belmont in collaboration with Friends of the Blood Bank. 

Most of us tend to not think twice about giving blood until a family member or friend is in dire need of it. However, every day hundreds of people in T&T find themselves in situations where they are in need of blood, but the National Blood Transfusion Unit is unable to consistently provide without consistent voluntary donations. It takes at most 20 minutes of your time to donate blood and one donation can save up to three lives.

Our focus at Alta is improving the lives of adults in T&T through literacy—we provide free classes at more than 50 venues around the country, where we teach adults to read and write. In this way, we both change and save lives. Alta is an association of volunteer tutors who, despite being spread out around the country have close ties. 

Unfortunately, recently many of our tutors and their family members have had to undergo operations or have been diagnosed with diseases which resulted in them being in dire need of blood. This led to us realising the importance of getting into the habit of donating blood as often as possible and we decided to host this drive as a means of spreading awareness among our tutors. 

“We thought this would be a good venture for all members of the Alta family,” remarked Alta’s office manager, Karelle Clarke. 

“We want people to be aware of the fact that they should not wait until someone is ill to rush to give blood—make it a habit, it’s an easy way to save lives.” 

The blood drive will begin promptly at 9 am and end at 3 pm, at Alta’s head office, on 84 Belmont Circular Road in Belmont, Port-of-Spain. 

There are some guidelines as to who can and cannot give blood. Generally you must wait at least two months between donations of blood. As a matter of precaution, people who have had body piercings or tattoos must wait at least one year before donating blood in case of infections, while people who have been exposed to hepatitis B and C do not qualify. 

Only half a pint (500ml) of blood is taken and donors will be allowed to relax before leaving. 

• Members of the Alta family and members of the public are invited to spread the word and join Alta in a day of saving lives. Interested people can call 624-2582 to pre-register.

Republic Bank Exocubs, the junior band of Exodus Steel Orchestra, did T&T proud with an outstanding performance at the just concluded Iguazu In Concert International Festival of Children & Youth Orchestras & Choirs organised by the government of the province of Misiones, Argentina.

The festival offered a wonderful opportunity for children around the globe to share a musical experience that encompasses not only music, but spiritual and ethical values, such as tolerance, environmental conservation, team building and, of course, the joy of making music together.

The festival was held last month and during that period the groups participated in workshops and sectionals in the mornings, taught by master teachers from the Teatro Colon Orchestras. In addition, beside the final concert each group was required to perform at two concerts. 

Exocubs’ first concert was on May 24 at the Escuela 875 Dona Mercedes Garcia De Taratuty. Sharing the stage with Exocubs were Orquesta Maravillas del Mundo Puerto Iguazu and Coro Infantil Santa Cecilia of Argentina.

The group’s second concert was at the Anfiteatro Ramon Ayala and also featured Argentina’s Ballet del Instituto Superior de Artes del Teatro Colon, Sonidos de la Tierra- Arpas paraguayas (Paraguay) and Orquestra Instituto GPA (Brasil).

Exocubs received standing ovations and encores at every performance, as the audiences were mesmerised by the sound coming from the steelpan. The children were like celebrities and children from other countries requested photographs with them. 

The festival ended on May 28 and featured performances from young artistes from across the globe including Zimbabwe, Switzerland, France, Paraguay, Peru, Brasil, Chile and Argentina. 

In addition, soloists from different countries and dancers from Argentina were showcased. They all performed at the grand concert at the most breathtaking sight, overlooking the Iguazu Falls on the grounds of the Sheraton Hotel. At that finale, Exocubs performed Ganges and The Nile with vocals. Before they finished playing the audience started to applaud. At the end, all the groups performed El Minsu, written and conducted by Andrea Merenzon.

This epic tour was a wonderful experience for the young people as they were exposed to different cultures, music and gained appreciation for eco-tourism. The members of Exocubs were truly young ambassadors and kept the T&T flag flying high and with pride.

Exocubs, chaperoned by Exodus manager Ainsworth Mohammed and Julie Williams, returned home on May 31. 

(Reporting by Peter Ray Blood)

Exocubs touring team

Tenors: Jryck Williams, Yadaav Charran and Rianna Oliver

Double Tenor: Ifeyi Iton and Malaya Rampersad

Double Seconds: Ilori Waithe

Double Guitar: Tamia Evans

Cellos: AAliyah Antoine

Tenor Bass: Amayu Mohipath

Bass: Tia John

Drummer: Nichols Thomas

Musical Director: Barry Mannette

Manager: Ainsworth Ainsworth.

Over 70 people, representing dozens of non-governmental and community-based organisations from across the south-eastern community of Mayaro, turned out for a training seminar that marked the 2016 launch of capacity-building workshops organised by energy company BP Trinidad and Tobago.

Hosted at the bpTT Mayaro Resource Centre last week, the session set the agenda for the instructional series that has delivered free training to more than 2,500 people from Mayaro and environs since its inception in 2003. 

Ronda Francis, Corporate Responsibility manager, bpTT, explained why this initiative is critical at this juncture: “Internationally, NGOs and CBOs have played a major role in the drive for sustainable development at the community level. This trend is evident in Mayaro where these groups have become the leaders in shaping progress and advancement and that role is now more important than ever. With the current economic situation, including the impact of global energy prices, we feel that it is imperative that we empower these groups with specialised training that will equip them to not only brave the tough times ahead, but also to nurture sustainable development in this community.” 

As a major part of the training, participants were engaged in an interactive presentation titled, The Energy Sector and Mayaro: An Opportunity for Change. Delivered by noted economist and banker, Terrence Clarke, the session covered a number of critical topics including the global energy market, the future of energy prices, the Trinidad and Tobago energy sector and the way forward for Mayaro.

As one of the younger participants, 19-year-old Kelly Ann Khallawan was grateful for the insight provided by the session, “I am an executive member of the Mayaro Village Council and I am also an economics student at UWI. I believe that I have gained deeper knowledge of global economics and how it impacts directly on Mayaro. They have also indicated that the training sessions going forward will be structured to develop key skills sets that will enable all of the groups to maximise their effectiveness and guide our community forward.”

Administered by training agency, Cross and Associates, a two-day workshop will be held each month that will deliver a mix of practical and theoretical understanding of key subject areas including How to Earn an Income from Micro-Agriculture, which will be conducted on the 18th and 19th of May. Other sessions will cover topics such as trauma intervention for the retrenched or unemployed, how to start, manage and operate a small business, managing change, website creation and financial management.

Andrew Cross, lead consultant with Cross and Associates, explained the transformed approach, “We will provide technical training in terms of aspects that are important to weathering the storms of change including entrepreneurial development and budgeting. Given the current reality, however, we will also incorporate psychosocial elements to enable these groups to deal with the most vulnerable in society. This will include training on how to deal with depression, suicidal thoughts and other negative behaviour that can stem from the challenges presented by the current economic situation.”

National Gas Company (NGC) chairman Gerry Brooks congratulated the winners of the UWI Research Awards, noting that UWI and NGC were working to “deepen the NGC/UWI partnership which will also accelerate acquisition of (both entities’) strategic objectives.” 

He was speaking at the UWI-NGC Research Awards at UWI’s Learning Resource Centre. NGC recently cemented its commitment to The University of the West Indies (UWI), St Augustine, by presenting its outgoing principal, Professor Clement Sankat, with a cheque for TT$1.5 million at the Principal’s Office on June 1. 

Brooks said, “NGC has committed more than $15 million to The UWI since 1998, through our support of the Institute of Engineering; grants for BSc students in the Petroleum Geoscience programme, contributions to the University’s Graduate and Research Fund, donation to the Trevor Boopsingh Endowment Fund and Sponsorship of the UWI Research Awards, Research Forum, Research Expo and Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship—we at NGC welcome the opportunity to collaborate and partner with the University.” 

In his address, Brooks also noted that NGC was finalising its strategic plan for 2016 to 2020. He said pillars for growth were identified, including; internationalisation of NGC’s business, pursuit of new significant opportunities in the energy value chain and organisational transformation predicated on capacity-building, and cultural realignment. 

A release said the NGC chairman reiterated NGC’s firm faith in the university, by telling the audience that NGC was keen to engage with UWI in dialogue, surrounding the pursuit of other future potential areas that would redound to the benefit of both parties; especially in areas of studies relative to solar and wind farms, innovation of small-scale domestic applications for harvesting renewable power as a fixture in our energy landscape, entrepreneurial intent and innovative strategies to help bring marginal gas fields’ supplies on stream, among others. 

The NGC Group chairman reiterated the company’s commitment to be actively involved in the process of realising “our shared expectations and vision, that of developing T&T for future generations.”