So cleaning is not work?

November 03, 2004

I am rather not surprised that to many people in this society the tasks that Cepep contractors perform is not work! This is indeed a strange place.

I remember an experience that I had somewhere back in the late 1970s, probably in l978, while I edited the Vanguard, the newspaper of the Oilfields Workers Trade Union.

I lived then in Tunapuna and had to travel daily from Curepe to San Fernando. It was Christmas time and that morning I bought a pack of salted nuts at Curepe Junction before boarding the taxi to San Fernando.

I ate the nuts along the way, left the shells in the paper package and stuffed it away in one of the compartments of my shoulder-bag.

On reaching San Fernando, I remembered that I needed to purchase Christmas cards and went into one of the stores on High Street to make the purchase. I chose the cards and went to the cashier to pay.

On reaching into my shoulder-bag to locate my wallet my hands chanced to touch the package of shells.

I took the package out and asked the gentleman behind the cash-register for his garbage bin. He pointed it out to me and I walked across to the bin and deposited the package of shells.

On my return to transact the sale I noticed that the goodly gentleman was scrutinising me. Then he, this aged Indo-Trinidadian, apparently the owner of the store, said to me: "Can I ask you something?"

I replied, "Sure, you can!"

"You lived abroad?" he asked with a smile.

I forced a smile in return and walked away, choosing then not to answer.

We seem to have a penchant for littering and of course there is the corollary that we seem to hate to clean. And even when perchance we may clean our immediate surroundings, it is only to take the results of our cleaning and either dump it in the river, or on the corner, or in the empty piece of land opposite or over the wall and into the neighbouring lot.

It is madness, I tell you. How can one be so proud of one's own well-kept premises, the well-demarcated lawn and flower-beds, and at the same time be so disregarding of the overall environment that has to be countenanced, 24-7, by the general public?

There are people here who will host their friends to lavish parties at their posh homes and then put the shells of the jumbo-shrimps they served in the trunks of their cars and drive down the street to dump it somewhere. Anywhere. It is too dangerous, you see, to go to the Beetham dump.

Don't talk about when one of their pets, a pedigree dog maybe, dies.

When we were poor people with a working-class perspective, in other words, when our proletarian consciousness predominated, we were accustomed to dig holes in our yard to bury pets that passed on.

Now apparently we have become so far removed from touching the soil with our bare hands that digging holes is beyond us or we have become so overwhelmed by the consciousness of concrete jungles that yards of the past no longer exist, so we place dead pets in garbage bags and dump them on the corner.

How can such a people ever come to appreciate the work that Cepep workers do?

You walk the streets of Port-of-Spain, our capital city, and there you see mounds of garbage thrown out openly into the streets by owners of stores who are multi-millionaires. They do not live in the city and never will so they do not have to contend with the cockroach and rat infestations.

Recently even the fast-food outlet in Port-of-Spain that is reputed to be the most profitable outlet in the world for a reputable international chain was cited by public health inspectors for health infractions.

The saddest part of this story was the puerile idiotic attempts by the management reps to rationalise away the violations. Damage control to save their sales and profit margins was their sole purpose.

You come down the Priority Bus Route seated in a maxi and you see Cepep workers in uniform fighting to keep the Beetham area and the nearby ravines clean but the very ravines are stagnant with effluent from manufacturing concerns close by and the stench is unbearable.

But this has been so for the past 50 years. That there is a kindergarten school right there beside the ravine is of no concern to multi-millionaire businessmen. And even their factory-plants and buildings have neither been cleaned, far less painted for the past 50 years.

Walk through Port-of-Spain and see for yourself the numerous buildings, owned by extremely wealthy families, which are covered with fungus and grime despite the fact that these very buildings are rented out to Government at astronomical rates. And we are talking about making T&T a developed country and making Port-of-Spain the financial capital of the Caribbean and the seat for the headquarters of not only the ACS but also, in time, the FTAA.

It is not crime that will be the biggest deterrent to this effort but the fear that someday our city may well be inundated by flood waters and garbage.

And who are the people cutting down the hills to erect their palaces, thereby intensifying the floods? And who are the people most responsible for the mounds of garbage in town?

The captains of industry and so-called citizens of substance must set the standards for the rest to follow. The standards set by the maintenance management of the Lara Promenade have been quite exemplary and the people in general have shown their appreciation by the way they utilise the promenade.

But at the same time they never tire of being critical of the Cepep programme. It is not work, they say. It is not productive, they only painting stone! Since when is cleaning and beautifying one's environment not productive? I say expand Cepep and make the scope of works more exacting.

But apparently the ideal of our citizens of substance is to encourage us to live in as much filth as possible. For some time now it was faeces in doubles, now it's faeces in ice cream. We go do and do until the pandemic come.