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“[…] The frustration in Greenvale, however, runs deeper than a single Sunday blackout. The community already feels utterly abandoned. The general election, which promised so much, has long passed, leaving a vacuum where change was supposed to be.
“[…] We need some level of professionalism, which starts not with a working transformer, but with a working conscience.
“Instead, we get the runaround: the defensive silence, the unfulfilled promise of a return time, and the classic Trini experience of being treated by workers like your problem is cutting into their free time…”
The following Letter to the Editor on the failure of essential services over successive governments in Greenvale, La Horquetta, was submitted to Wired868 by Joel M Quamina:
Last Sunday, just as the evening was settling, that crucial hour when sanity is attempted before the Monday morning madness, the lights went out in Greenvale, La Horquetta.
Feeling less aggrieved than resigned, I bore witness to the only constant in this geography: the absolute, infuriating unreliability of the state.
What followed were hours that revealed yet again why we are not merely inconvenienced by rubbish essential services, but are actively impoverished by a system that expects us to accept incompetence as a national character trait.
The frustration in Greenvale, however, runs deeper than a single Sunday blackout. The community already feels utterly abandoned. The general election, which promised so much, has long passed, leaving a vacuum where change was supposed to be.
(via PNM.)
Crime is overgrown, an insidious, daily reality. The bushes along our main roads are thick and menacing, a physical manifestation of neglect.
Our long-awaited community centre building remains stalled—a rusting skeleton of broken promises.
And while we deal with these current failures, the memory and financial burden of the Great Flood of 2018 still weigh heavily, a trauma from which many residents have yet to fully recover.
For us, every new service failure is a fresh betrayal layered upon years of institutional indifference.
Photo: Annalicia Caruth/ Wired868.
Before I elaborate on this national psychological trauma, I must share the story of the current darkness. The antagonist is T&TEC; the at-wits-end agonist is a populace held hostage by its own light switch.
To be clear, this column isn’t about the particular substation that decided to take a Sunday nap, per se.
It’s a treatise on the smug, systemic failure of essential services, the Trini condition that perpetuates it, and the wider implication that our institutions view the citizenry as a negligible nuisance.
The power, predictably, went out at 5pm. This is not an aberration; it is a ritual.
We are accustomed to the lights flickering off without explanation, always at the times we need them most: before school, on a Sunday evening, or in the pre-dawn silence at 1am, when a working fridge is a prerequisite for a functional life.
What followed was the deafening silence of an essential service that simply does not deem its customers worthy of communication.
As I write this on Monday, 29 September, at 3.27am, the darkness still reigns. Two days of the week, utterly undone.
This routine is costly. The constant, savage fluctuation of the electricity is less a technical issue and more an electrical act of vandalism, steadily destroying appliances like a chronic disease.
My neighbours and I have paid the price in silence, smoking hard-won goods. The real gut-punch, however, is the memory it resurrects: the Great Flood of 2018, moving back in to two days of darkness, watching every morsel of food in the fridge perish.
We are in the throes of unprecedented economic upheaval, yet the state agencies that underpin the very possibility of commerce and comfort—T&TEC and WASA—treat their customers as though they are asking for a power cut or a water stoppage.
If it’s not WASA’s drought-level non-delivery, it is T&TEC’s sudden, unexplained blackouts. Where exactly are we living? Enough, as you rightly say, is enough.
We need some level of professionalism, which starts not with a working transformer, but with a working conscience.
Instead, we get the runaround: the defensive silence, the unfulfilled promise of a return time, and the classic Trini experience of being treated by workers like your problem is cutting into their free time.
Now on to the real kernel of wisdom in this story. The failure is not in the copper or the water pump; it’s in the leadership’s capacity for analysis.
Our distaste for critical thinking solidifies our fate as authors of our own backwardness. We are stuck in a gyre of failed ambitions because the people responsible for delivering the forest only see the wooden table.
The problem isn’t the power line or the pipeline; it’s our national reluctance to demand more than mediocrity from our essential services, and our officials’ refusal to provide it.
Some, but not all Trinis (enough, though) aren’t nearly as clever in their discernment as they believe themselves to be, but they are far more narrow-minded in their expectations than they can ever be convinced they are.
(Copyright Shridhar Vashistha / Unsplash.)
That’s why, though the electricity will eventually return (and we will be grateful for the bare minimum), the wider malaise of institutional, state-sanctioned unprofessionalism will prevail.
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