The gift of hope

Debbie Jacob

SOMETIMES we recognise the moments in time that changed our lives long after they happen. I realised this last week when pan historian and filmwriter Kim Johnson and I watched his documentary Wishing for Wings with Maple Leaf International School students and teachers.

In the documentary – and the book it was based on – I credit maths teacher Gwendolyn Pope for wearing me down until I finally volunteered to teach a CXC English language class at the Youth Training Centre (YTC) in 2010. The experience led to my life of community service.

But my connection to community service stretches back to my days at the Trinidad Express and editor-in-chief Owen Baptiste.

One December in the 80s – I can’t remember the exact year – OB took me off my regular work for a special Christmas assignment. My job was to search for people with special needs, find businesses or organisations to make their wishes come true and write a feature about the outcome. The only story I recall from the many I wrote was about TSTT sponsoring hearing aids for several students at the School for the Deaf.

During that month on OB's special assignment, I experienced generosity and hope that touched and changed me. Then, I returned to work as usual.

Nearly 40 Christmas seasons later, I sat behind attentive, empathetic Maple Leaf students watching Wishing for Wings. In the end, I turned to the teachers in tears beside me and without thinking said, “I had so much hope.”

I had hoped my students would pass their CXC English language exams; hoped they would come out of YTC as better boys equipped to face the culture of poverty and violence that had claimed them; hoped that they would find their rightful place in this country, and hoped that they would live to be old men.

In the question-and-answer period after the documentary, a girl who had read the book asked, “Can you speak about the boy who wanted to be a turtle.” Reading that must have hit her as it did me on that first day of class in YTC when I asked students to write a paragraph about what animal they would like to be.

Most of the teens chose birds so they could fly high enough for Trinidad and Tobago to look like a beautiful and happy place. Some chose lions or dogs. But O. chose a turtle because “turtles live to be about 100 so I could see generations of people pass through this life and I wouldn’t have to die at 30.”

O. forged his own path after YTC. He is working and surviving. Others defied the odds too. Marc Friday pursues his creative writing. Recently, he recorded his YTC calypso-winning song Was Not Born a Criminal with musician Etienne Charles, thanks to a programme he is in with Baz Dreisinger, a world-renowned advocate for inmates’ rights.

But Jahmai is gone, shot to death with another young man as they cleared a field across from his home to grow crops in Pleasantville. Police think the drive-by shooting targeted the other young man who had fought with someone in a fete the week before. That is no comfort.

When Kendell Paul got arrested for robbery after his release from prison, I visited him in Golden Grove Prison, and desperately tried to get him back on track. When I walked away, two prison officers with me said, “You know he’s lost.”

I simply said, “Yes.”

He was later shot dead by police.

Everything had been put in place for him to succeed outside, but I saw the light disappear from his eyes the day he learned he could not achieve his dream of being a lawyer because of his prison conviction. He lost all hope after that.

Desean Brooker, filmed in the background of the documentary, got stabbed, had an operation in Port-of-Spain General Hospital and was shot to death in his hospital bed by a man dressed in white overalls on December 27, 2019. Desean was 25.

My thoughts are an endless loop of joy, sadness; hope and despair inextricably tangled together. I become more resilient and more determined to save young men society has written off. The students at Maple Leaf remind me there is hope in the future; hope in the next generation.

Looking back at that Christmas season when I connected TSTT with children needing hearing aids, I now see that experience symbolised something so simple yet so profound: someone listened; someone heard.

That is what hope is all about.