A few years ago, I lived in a one-bedroom apartment with my daughter. It wasn’t fancy, but it was tiled, air-conditioned, close to the highway and the price was right.

One afternoon, as I was getting ready to leave work for the day, I got a message from a neighbour (in the same building) telling me that the power was out. She said something about an issue with the meter, but in my haste to face the rush hour traffic and pick my daughter up from the sitter, I didn’t pause to figure out what she meant.

When we arrived home, I found the building in darkness and the sole electricity meter missing entirely from the front of the building. As this was obviously not a good sign, I reached out to the landlord, who fed me some vagueries about a mix-up with T&TEC that he was in the process of sorting. He assured me the power would be back soon.

Two weeks passed.

Two weeks, during which I had to help my daughter with her work by candlelight, buy ice for a styrofoam cooler to keep our food edible, fan her to sleep at night and make sure we were both presentable for work and school, respectively, in the dark.

Each day, the landlord assured me that he was sorting out the mix-up and T&TEC would be by tomorrow to replace the meter and reconnect the building. He thanked me for my patience. He suggested that I could charge my phone at a relative’s house down the trace from the building. Eventually, he even offered to waive the month’s rent, as if I was planning to pay him for the privilege of reverting to the stone age.

At the end of those two weeks, I reached out to him one more time to see whether there was any meaningful update. He fed me the “tomorrow” line once again and I thanked him for the information.

Then I taped up the final few boxes and prepared to load them into the moving van that was waiting to move us less than five minutes away to a new two-bedroom air-conditioned apartment, the lease for which I’d signed at the end of week one of that disaster.

As we loaded the last box into the truck, I sent the landlord a WhatsApp message letting him know where he could find the key and wishing him all the best.

I’ve never been back since and I never did find out exactly when T&TEC restored the power, but if I were a betting woman, I’d wager they installed more than one meter that day.

I was reminded of this story when I read the article in today’s Express titled “Have More Patience“. In it, the Beetham MP apologised and provided context for the situation which led to the protest that ground traffic to a standstill outside of Port of Spain yesterday.

The problem, MP Fitzgerald Hinds explained, is that WASA is currently trying to replace water lines that were installed right around the time Trinidad and Tobago became independent. Given the scale of the project (because ALL of Beetham’s lines are past their golden jubilee anniversary), the exercise is obviously taking some time. The current emergency is the result of a massive sinkhole that opened up in August (as a result of a collapsed portion of the geriatric sewage system), causing sewage to spread towards residents’ homes. According to a press release dropped by WASA yesterday afternoon, repairs were also delayed while they sourced a few very special concrete cylinders needed to complete the work. MP Hinds said he’s asked for the project to be accelerated and for some more pumps to be installed to keep waste from running into the community’s homes. Addressing the residents, he said “To those who have run out of patience…exercise a little more.”

Exercise a little more patience.

If you’re keeping count, the people of Beetham Gardens have been living with raw sewage for about five months. Most of us can’t fathom the smell of an entire community’s sewage, let alone grasp what it would mean to live with it for months on end. The idea of that sewage running into our homes?

I am a patient woman, but a week of managing the demands of working single-parenthood in the dark was enough to have me apartment-hunting that weekend. I was fortunate to have the means to do so. If I didn’t, I’m not sure how I would have finally made it clear to my landlord that the situation was unacceptable and untenable, but I’m more than sure that he would’ve deemed it unreasonable, even as he enjoyed his uninterrupted electricity supply at home.

It’s revealing that a person responsible for representing a community’s interests would feel comfortable excusing themselves with the fact that that community’s infrastructure is approximately as old as the nation itself. Also revealing is the fact that the organisation responsible for a segment of the national infrastructure could get away with allowing a segment of the sewage system to deteriorate without proper maintenance for so long. That all of the above felt comfortable, after allowing raw sewage to run into the homes of actual human beings, asking these same human beings to hold strain for five months under those circumstances… that’s something else entirely. Taken in its entirety, it says something very disturbing about what we think is ok here in sweet T&T.

In light of all of this, a morning of disrupted traffic seems rather minor in comparison. Particularly when it looks like that same disruption is what prompted in the WASA press release, the request for expedited repairs (which makes one wonder what pace they were moving at before) and more pumps to hold back the obvious public health hazard.

When I said we aren’t as far removed from the Beetham as we would like to believe, I wasn’t kidding. Most of us have dealt with this level of indifference from those responsible for representing our interests and maintaining our nation’s infrastructure before. While they’re savvy enough to know whom they can suffer and how much, they also know that they can suffer most of us to some extent and get away with it. It may not be sewage, but it’s the healthcare, the education, the roads, the water and/or the electricity.

Of course, there are those they can’t afford to suffer at all. Ironically, there are communities within a mere ten kilometres for which an MP responding to a sewage issue with “exercise a little more” patience would be unimaginable. Assuming such an issue would even be allowed to arise in the first place, they wouldn’t have to burn tyres and block roads to get relief. We all know it and the Beetham residents know it, too.

In their own words:

“For months now the infrastructure in the community has been broken. The area has been smelling of feces. Day and night, we are living in this toxicity. It is unbearable. We have tried to get WASA attention. No luck. We tried to get the Minister of Public Utilities. No luck. We even try to reach that MP of ours Mr Hinds, but as usual, nothing was done. He couldn’t be bothered. So what other choice do we have? We have to get your attention somehow. It’s women, children, and old people living here. Just because we are poorer than you, or live in a community that you might not think the best of, do you think we can be treated anyhow? That is not right, and this is all we are trying to do. Get their attention, so that work can be completed,” one resident who gave his name as Ishmael explained.

“Licks for Hinds as Beetham residents block highway, again” Trinidad Express, 10th January, 2022