Dear Minister Housing and the Environment, Dr Roodal Moonilal: I am becoming an obsessive compulsive letter writer. Although I am a woman and a journalist, when I look at a homeless old man on the street, looking bewildered as an enormous ministerial car with tinted glass roars past, splashing water on his face, or an employee at the industrial estate walking on a dirt track at night by the light of an industrial flare piteously weeping on the way home because he has cancer, a sense of powerlessness overpowers me, and I feel like they do, forgotten, invisible, wretched. Last week after my letter to your colleague Dr Tim Gopeesingh, (conveying shocking statistics given to me by Paula Lucie Smith, the founder of the only adult literacy programme in T&T, of the 500,000 illiterate people who inhabit our islands, explaining the brutality on the roads, homes, swollen bellies of teenage girls, sour face of our services) pleading with him to call her, a good corporate citizen pledged funds to Alta. I have assured Paula that Dr Gopeesingh will be very open to hearing from her. He delivers babies, after all. He’s a meticulous man who cares about lives. He told me recently that he “hasn’t lost one yet,” meaning a baby.

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