Now one of suffering elderly

 Debbie Jacob -
Debbie Jacob -

I REMEMBER the stories of how my grandmother Josephine risked her life to feed her family in Nazi Germany during World War II. Every day she rummaged through farmers’ fields to find sugar beets and potatoes farmers might have missed while harvesting. I can imagine her searching desperately for ways to take care of her family.

My mother said my grandmother “worked like a dog her whole life.” Her pot of gold at the end of the rainbow was nothing more than her pension and US social security cheque.

I can never imagine reaching my grandmother’s level of suffering in my life. Still, it is strange to be retired like a cow put out to pasture. It’s difficult to comprehend the swing in status from being a valued, independent person making a decent salary to a needless individual sitting at home waiting for my NIS and pension cheques that should have reached since July.

Today, I write on behalf of all the elderly people in this country in the same boat that I am in waiting for a flimsy lifeline from their pensions and NIS. It is a sad and degrading state of being.

Covid19 dumped many economic and medical hardships on the poor and the elderly in this country. Prices for food have increased astronomically. I understand the challenges we all face, but I don’t understand why the elderly must suffer for what they have earned from a lifetime of hard work.

I am better off than most people. I have a credit card, which I don’t want to use. Debt on top of a fixed income is not a pleasant thought. I am depleting my saving that I hoped to save for a rainier day or for a trip to see my daughter in Belgium.

It is good for the Ministry of Health to hold daily press conferences that often mention their concern for the elderly, but the Government needs to reduce the stress elderly people suffer when they can’t get their pittance they need to live on. We don’t want to be dependent on other people. We need the Government to act responsibly.

Minister of Finance Colm Imbert’s budget speech, which highlighted the dwindling NIS fund and warned of the possibility of it trickling down to nothing in the next decade, demonstrates how little effort the Government has put in protecting the elderly. We are in the same predicament as the US where the threat of social security going bankrupt is a constant cry, yet that doesn’t bring a whimper of concern from anyone.

We understand that less people are working in government offices because of covid19 restrictions and there are delays in processing pensions and NIS payments, but someone should be able to give us an estimate of when we can expect money.

Many times I have made depressing phone calls to NIS and my pension provider inquiring about when I can expect payment, only to be told no one knows when I will get my money.

“Would it be another month? Six months? A year?” I have asked.

Their reply: “We can’t say.”

Now I ask, “How do the elderly find a sense of dignity and a sense of trust in a government that seems to have cast us aside?”

I have spent my life in Trinidad trying to give to this country. I found grants to help prisons and police. I helped vagrants on the street, inmates in prison, schoolchildren raising money, but I must confess I never considered the needs of the elderly until I reached that milestone. Now I know now how much a care package of groceries would have lightened the load for a poor person struggling to live on an old-age pension.

I’m sorry I didn’t think more of the elderly when I was younger or that I never really internalised the struggles of my grandmother, who died soon after she received her pension.

We don’t generally know what the elderly in this country face because they don’t protest or make noise about their plight. They struggle silently and suffer the indignity of ageism, which is a real prejudice.

Now, NIS and BIR, which I am told is keeping back my pension, need to expedite the money owed to the elderly. I can’t imagine that anyone working in those offices ever thought about all those grandmothers like mine who struggled their whole lives for nothing more than the right to earn a measly pension. Think about that, public servants, when you leave people waiting months for their money.

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"Now one of suffering elderly"

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