Notes from Trinidad: Port of Spain
[I’m making a few short notes from internet cafés until I get my act together and don’t forget to back up onto USB stick.]
The trauma of flying, long queues, missing-and-found, luggage, missed connections and a prolonged interrogation at the last hurdle all rolled into one on my long journey to Port of Spain, but more about that later.
I’m here!
How is it that—after 20-odd hours spent in transit—it’s impossible to go to sleep? I sat on the balcony, stupidly gazing at palm trees and at what looked like a Dutch colonial building across the street where cars were zooming along long after midnight, sipping coke and duty free Barbadian rum and pondering how it was that I woke up at 6 a.m. that morning and stepped out into the cold November drizzle, seemingly on a different planet.
This morning was no less confusing. Port of Spain has a flavour all of its own (tourism forms no part of it), but it feels like an odd mix of Northeast Australia and Malaysia, definitely with Sri Lanka thrown in.
A once said that Trinidad is like Sri Lanka, but without the poverty. That is true. There is some poverty and there are enough beggars in the street, but there isn’t the sense of despair. Certainly not on that scale, although it might just not as visible. The laws are strict: micro-vendors are banned from public areas and touting is a no-no (how refreshing!)
But it is there all the same. The only time I have seen as much blood in the street unnoticed was back in Africa when I saw a man with a shredded arm. I saw another man today, with almost the entire skin on his left calf stripped off. The wound was so bright red it looked painted on, if it hadn’t been for all the blood. Some of it formed glistening puddles on the pavement and was coagulating, so that at first I thought someone had thrown offal into the street. It couldn’t have come from a human.
But it had. The man just sat there, in the same pose as the many beggars by the roadside, staring at his leg. He seemed to have come from nowhere, there was no altercation, no sound, no sign of any accident.
And the people just walked by. Me too. I was too shocked to stop. Not my place, I kept thinking.
If nobody has called an ambulance, the man will die. He’ll need extensive skin grafts. I wonder who pays for that here.
Not much later I walked through a fair on the magnificent strip of Independence Square. I walked right into the cameras pointing at the stage where, in front of his ministery, the Minister for Social Affairs was holding a speech. The people were all dressed up and smiling, many of them in wheelchairs. All the stalls represented charities and disability groups. The speech was about social change and building the community, so perhaps there was hope for the bleeding man.
Tags: Americas, Pearl Guest House, Port of Spain, Trinidad, Tag Index
Denni