Flooding and our children

THE EDITOR: Events of the past few days are too familiar – the brown torrent of water covering roads, the cries of trapped constituents and the wailing over the loss of household goods, business stock, and other material possessions.

To this familiar annual litany comes a new note of alarm: the despair of children trapped in their homes, unable to write their CSEC or CAPE exams. Many students in the central and southern parts of the country are in the midst of writing examinations for which they have been preparing for several years and which will affect their immediate and long-term future.

Opposition MPs, aldermen and councillors have done, and are doing as much as we can to help these students get to their examination centres.

However, it is the Government that controls the resources, and I beg them to immediately mobilise their resources to ensure our children can get to and from their examination centres.

The flooding, the bad roads and the harsh social conditions under which we all live have already exacted a toll on these innocents. Through no fault of theirs, the places they live, study and strive in have become in some cases, unbearable.

They already enter the exam room with all this hanging around their necks. I beg the Government not to add the more egregious injury of being unable to actually enter the examination room.

For many of these students, especially those from distant communities, one promise of our nation still holds: the promise of an education as a means of upward mobility.

Government should treat this issue as an emergency – since if they are unable to write their exams in the stipulated period over the next few days and weeks, these children's lives will be stalled for a year, as there is no guarantee of CXC accommodating them to write these exams later on this year.

Government can help by:

* Mapping out just who, where, and how many the affected students are.

* Allocate resources (appropriate four-wheel-drive vehicles and drivers) and perhaps safe temporary accommodation – closer to exam centres – for those in particularly hard-hit areas.

* Petition CXC for alternative arrangements for those students who actually missed their exams because of the flooding.

I and all of my colleagues already have an idea of where the worst affected students are and we are, as always, ready to co-operate with Government to help our youth constituents.

I also urge, as many before me have done, that Government do the common-sense necessaries to ensure the annual flooding becomes merely an inconvenience rather than an actual emergency where lives, work and studies are directly affected.

I urge Government to put aside political gamesmanship and think of the welfare of our students including their mental well-being, considering they would have spent years preparing for these exams. Their future is the country's future.

DINESH RAMBALLY

MP, Chaguanas West