Poor La Brea
Stephen McCrea and Germain Francis sit at the side of the road and talk with the Business Guardian about life in La Brea.
This young boy is at home instead of attending school.
BY ASHA JAVEED
Sharon Allen, 43, makes a living washing clothes.
The tools of her trade are a scrubbing board and three tubs made from the bottom halves of old plastic barrels. Several cans filled with water are littered about while the clothes lie on an old galvanise sheet before being hung out to dry. She walked around the yard in her bare feet, head unshielded from the burning sun last Friday morning, as she went about her daily routine.
The job isn’t profitable. It charges $30 a load and people refuse to pay.
I wash clothes for a man and he still owing me money. He brought two piles again and rather than have it pile up, I wash it. He come to pick it up and when I refuse to give him before he pays, he start to cuss,” recalled Allen, whose hands are hard and blistered from the work.
So I just told him to take it and go and count that money dead,” she said, shrugging her shoulders with a forced smile. Allen said she also does “10-days work” when its available but that’s usually once a month.
Aspiring to a better quality of life has been a challenge. She admits that she has ten children—the oldest is 24 and the youngest is five—who live in a children’s home because she was unable to take care of them.
The dilapidated house in which she lives, on Porter Street, La Brea, belongs to a relative and Allen admits that the wooden house cannot withstand the weight of a bed, so she sleeps on the floor.
For Allen, job opportunities have been limited because she doesn’t have “book sense,” she says, pointing to her head.
Her children, though, are going to school and whatever little money she gets, she gives to the home to buy books and “things to eat.”
Germain Francis, 54, also works as a cleaner but depend on the “10 days work” to get by. She also takes care of her twin grandchildren while her daughter looks for work. Francis says there are a lot of single mothers in La Brea but it’s hard to get someone to take care of the children while they go out to work.
Allen and Francis’ situations are not unusual in La Brea.
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At 86, Gwendolyn Lewis, spends most of her day sitting on the wooden porch of her house in La Brea which is built of galvanise sheets. From her vantage point, situated on the main road, she observes La Brea’s daily life unfolding and is quick to point out its hardscrabble circumstance.
Here have poverty to kill,” she lamented, shaking her head. Lewis, petite with a crown of white hair, still has a sharp mind.
She points to a house over the road: “That is my son’s house but he don’t work. When I get my pension I have to split it and pay light bill, phone bill, and water and give him some. Because he have to take care of my grandson. I can’t allow him to go and thief.”
Her son is 46. She adopted him when she was 40.
She noted that there is work available but that people don’t want to work.
I’m living here all my life and I can tell you,” she said.
The truth is that the Government offer Cepep and 10 days and plenty training. But them young boys come and do nothing and then they does complain that they don’t have work. They just want to get some money to go and smoke,” she said.
Abby Tony, 21, talks about the village while babysitting her niece.
Gwendolyn Lewis, 86, sits on her porch in her home in La Brea.
Photos: Shirley Bahadur
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‘Poverty to kill’
At home in La Brea. Sereena Smith, on the steps of her house, along with neighbours, contemplate life in La Brea.
Photos: Shirley Bahadur
Unemployment’s making life tough for La Brea residents
Poor but crime free
The once depressed area has been the site for the Union Industrial Estate and the Labidco Industrial Estate. But industrialisation hasn’t managed to permeate throughout the area as it has in Point Lisas and Point Fortin.
Some residents live in squalid conditions, while others live in two-storey concrete houses, but one villager remarked that the area is almost free of crime except petty thieves who go after fruit trees.
Govt’s MUST programme
Attempts at improving the standard of living of villagers have not been successful.
Residents are not skilled and have not capitalised on the Government’s MUST training programme to get certified.
A guide at the Pitch Lake was quick to note that 90 per cent of the people doing fabrication work at the Union Industrial Estate were not from La Brea.
Many residents are still unemployed even as the Government boasts of almost full employment.
Stephen McCrea, a resident, said that there are still many people who want work.
What work there is not for us. We don’t have 20 per cent of the community which is skilled,” he said.
The Government have put programmes in place so in the near future we will probably have lower employment in the area but for now, it is what it is. The process takes some time and training,” he remarked.
Youth and training
In contrast, Henry Ojoe, noted that some people don’t have the initiative to work.
A lot of work has opened up. It have some lazy ones but some are doing training. It have people who don’t want to work and just want a mouthful,” said Ojoe.
A point which 21-year-old Abby Tony acknowledges.
Tony, who was at home babysitting a niece, said that she was enrolled in a MUST training course building cupboards.
I really want to be a cook but I had nothing to do so I enrolled in the course. If I get a job, that will be good too,” she said.
Poverty has a lot to do with making money and in this area it have plenty of fellas who just don’t want to work. It also have plenty of single mothers with nobody minding them so there is a cycle,” she said.
Alcid Bernard, 20, one of two young men chatting near the La Brea Main Road, told the Business Guardian he had been looking for a job for nine months. His companion Dillion Jeffery, 24, said he was on vacation from his job in the maintenance department at Venture Productions.
Bernard, a graduate of Point Fortin Senior Secondary school, acknowledged that there was work but he would not consider taking up the jobs available.
It have a job where I have to scrape fish and put it in a bag. I not going to do that,” he said. He said he would consider a job anywhere except in “town.”
Asked whether he would consider himself poor, he brashly replied that his family pays all the bills.
I is not a poor person. It have people in this village who worse than me. They have nothing to eat,” he said.
Jeffery, on the other hand, said: “It have plenty poor people. You just have to look for it. Poverty is not just somebody who can’t eat. It’s living in a house where you can’t pay bills and you can’t eat like you should.”
A few streets away, Sereena Smith, 46, was quick to point out that poverty in La Brea was caused by unemployment.
Sitting on the porch of her wooden house, Smith was drying mango to make kuchela to sell, while she looked after her niece and nephew. She also earns a small income selling snacks from her home to the village children.
There are plenty people unemployed here. And it’s hard to get a job because you have to be educated. Some of the children go to school, some don’t go because they don’t like it,” she said.
The two-storey house is in stark contrast to the wooden house in La Brea’s interior.
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Gaping holes
Unemployment figures inaccurate
Sharon Allen, 43, stands outside her home in Porter Street, La Brea. Photo: Shirley Bahadur
Employment figure did not take into account people who were displaced because of closure of institutions such as Caroni or BWIA because according to the data collection methodology, they would still be classified as employed.
BY ASHA JAVEED
The boast of full employment does not paint an accurate picture of T&T’s poor.
Gary Tagallie, head of the European Union-sponsored poverty reduction programme, said that while the Central Statistical Office (CSO) figures paint a favourable picture of employment, it left gaping holes.
Christine Sahadeo, Minister in the Ministry of Finance, said the data was collected using three groups: the labour force, the employed and the unemployed.
The labour force includes people 15 years and over engaged in or willing and able to be engaged in the production of economic goods and services. The employed those who had jobs during the survey week and the unemployed includes all who looked for work at some time during the three-month period preceding enumeration and who at the time of the enumeration exercise were not working or had a job but still wanted to work.
Tagallie said the employment figure did not take into account people who were displaced because of closure of institutions such as Caroni or BWIA because according to the data collection methodology, they would still be classified as employed.
There has always been a link between the employment rate and evidence of poverty and what people are saying is that you have to question that link because it is how you define unemployment which will make the link,” he told the Business Guardian in an interview at his St Vincent Street office in Port-of-Spain.
He explained that poverty is not just about statistics but it’s also qualitative.
Seventeen per cent of the population live in poverty and there have been complaints that the social sector programmes have not been reaching the right people,” he acknowledged.
Tagallie explained that there are 512 communities but the community development officers and businesses would have a better feel of poverty-stricken areas.
Business people also know where poverty lies because people come to them,” he explained.
He said that poverty has been identified by geographical terms with the Tunapuna/Piarco area receiving the highest grant. Tagallie explained that $5.27 million was distributed to more than 229 organisations by December 31, 2006. (See graph)
The Ministry of Social Development has 64 social programmes in place to help improve the standard of living of unfortunate citizens.
Sahadeo explained that the trend is that unemployment has been steadily declining.
Based on data collected for the period October to November 2006, the unemployment rate has declined further to five per cent. The age group 15 to 19 continues to show the highest level of unemployment,” she said.
Double-digit unemployment rates at the end of 2005 were evident only among individuals in the age group 15-24 years.
Notwithstanding the general declining trend, there are some regions which exhibited still relatively high (double digit) levels of unemployment in 2005. These are Nariva/Mayaro: 20.4 per cent, Point Fortin: 15.1 per cent and Victoria: 10.1 per cent,” she said.
You are always going to have a group of people who are not seeking employment so therefore will not be included in any ratios you are talking about in computing your employment or unemployment. The question is: how do you change that and how do you motivate these people to get up and get. So these are the people who will be trying to access these Government programmes,” she said.
She noted that the Government usually attached a stipend to a programme which, upon completion, could earn a skilled worker between $200-$300 given the demands of the labour market.
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'The poor tend to become dependent’
Clive Pantin…
chief executive of FEEL.
Photo: Shirley Bahadur
There are a lot of poor people out there. I deal with human beings. I don’t deal with percentages,” said Clive Pantin, chief executive of the Foundation for the Enhancement and Enrichment of Life (FEEL).
This in light of the Government’s boast that unemployment has fallen to five per cent, a level regarded by economists as full employment. He noted that the boast of full employment did not necessarily relate to the poverty which exists in society.
Some people are not interested in getting a job. Either they haven’t looked or they haven’t found,” he said.
But he readily admits that it’s difficult to distinguish between the genuinely poor and the conmen and women. He recalled one man approaching him for a loaf of bread and eating it within minutes of getting it.
That set me straight about poverty,” he said.
He said the jobs which were being created weren’t necessarily sustainable and, while they paid, they did not leave people better off.
He said the Cepep and URP programmes should ideally have two hours of teaching—one hour of math and one hour of English—to ensure that people in the programmes were literate and numerate and could upgrade themselves.
That has never happened,” he observed.
We are swimming in a sea of wealth with oil and gas and the Government’s social programmes are not addressing the issues,” he said.
He explained that once poor people rely on handouts then they don’t take it upon themselves to look for jobs.
The biggest problem with the poor is that they become dependent,” he said.
At FEEL, he said, they identified poor families and gave them at least three consecutive hampers and after that they are on their own.
They have to try and be self-supportive and they tend to latch on to people who look after them,” he said.
Pantin said that a lot of times people come back for hampers, which are valued at $175, but FEEL is forced to turn them away.
“That is an attitude that we cannot tolerate because it creates a dependency syndrome and we need people to empower themselves,” he said.
—AJ
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Survey says: 17 % poverty in T&T
Economist Jwala Rambarran
Almost two years after it was commissioned and conducted, the Government has now received a draft of its Survey of Living Conditions in T&T.
But no date has been identified for its release.
The survey was carried out in June-August 2005 but remained caught up in bureaucracy as the consultant, Kairi Consultants—hired to analyse the data and compile the report—was only identified last year. The survey was administered to a random sample of 3, 621 households or 12,919 people in T&T.
Preliminary data revealed that poverty exists at 17 per cent with an indigent line of 1.2 per cent.
That was based on a survey conducted 21 months ago and the T&T landscape has changed significantly. Inflation, fueled by food prices, rose to ten per cent in January and is now at 8.6 per cent. The Government is boasting of almost full employment but pockets of poverty still exists in T&T. And construction projects have seen an influx of foreign labour.
So how relevant is the data? And what picture does it paint for the resource-wealthy country?
Data dated
Economist Jwala Rambarran observed that “a number of things have happened. There have been changes in the economic landscape which would have affected the data today. But that is what you work with when you talk about poverty data. You have data which is between one to two years old, which isn’t bad when you consider that the last survey of living conditions was carried out in 1992.”
But he expects that the situation would have worsened in the last two years.
When you look at food prices which have been increasing by 20 per cent in the last year with basic commodities going up, it is a significant dent to the poor. When the Government has to act, when they do their targeting, it will have to be with households that are deeply affected by the loss of purchasing power from food price inflation,” he said.
He also pointed to some aspects of the social dimension which have not improved in T&T's booming economy: there are more street children, increasing numbers of homeless people, more broken homes and growing levels of abuse.
Minister: Information is still relevant
Christine Sahadeo, Minister in the Ministry of Finance, remarked that, while it has taken a long time to collate, the data is still relevant.
She noted that the survey used scientific methodology, it covered approximately one per cent of the population and was adequate to ensure that reliable estimates of poverty levels could be computed from the sample households.
For example, she said the poverty line was based on an adult diet of 2,400 calories which amounted to $8.22 a day, and is the food poverty line for Trinidad. The indigence line is determined to be $665 a month.
“The table shows that 17.1 per cent of the population was poor in 2005, and 1.2 per cent was indigent. There was no indigence in Tobago even though the percentage poor was higher than the national average.
In the case of Trinidad, the percentage poor was 16.2 per cent while the percentage indigent was 1.3 per cent. In other words, there was no one in Tobago who did not have food needs fully satisfied, but on the basis of other criteria, 19 per cent were poor,” she said, quoting from a preliminary estimate of poverty and indigence in T&T based on the survey of living conditions.
Christine Sahadeo,
Minister in the Ministry of Finance,
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