“She have the flu,” he said, when I asked about his daughter, who sounded weak and listless on the phone.
Her symptoms? Fever, body aches and headache.
I told him it sounded like dengue, and he should probably get her tested. It baffled me that no one in the household had seen a connection. This is not a family without access to television and Internet. You cannot avoid the reports of cases.
The Insect Vector Control Division passed by recently, checking premises for mosquito breeding environments, and his had been a stomping ground for them. Yet, he was surprised at the idea.
People have been calling for more public education campaigns. I agree that they are important.
I remember some years ago—and I had written about it—having a conversation with a young boy from the neighbourhood. It was during the school vacation. He was around ten (he is a teenager now), and two of them were chatting with me as I squatted, weeding out some tenacious grass.
There was a sticky wrapper from some kind of sweet and an enormous pile of ants was swarming over it. I didn’t want to touch it because they were the fierce black ones whose bites sting like mad. I complained that it wasn’t right that I should have to deal with that because someone had obviously tossed the wrapper carelessly.
I started telling them that people don’t realise what happens when they litter everywhere, how it clogs drains and causes flooding that damages people’s homes and belongings.
Excitedly he told me that people had come to their school to tell them about pollution and what it does to the environment. He seemed proud to be able to list off the negative effects.
I asked him if it made him want to do more to take care of our country. He said it did. He’d gone home and told his mother that they shouldn’t throw things in their yard and in the street, and told her that it caused rats and roaches and other vermin to infest the place (which was their problem), and that it contributed to flooding and the smelly drains outside their home.
She brushed him aside, telling him that she didn’t have time to listen to that kind of thing.
It reminded me of how struck I was when I went to secondary school and we learned about the impact of aerosols on the ozone layer. I tried to tell my mother about the harmful effects of deodorant sprays and such things, but she was not having any of it.
She made fun of my crusading ways, probably because it was an unpleasant way to be excluded as your child learned new things that made you feel uncomfortable and ignorant—much like my young friend’s experience.
We learn things in different fashions, but often it is difficult to pass on the information.
A few days ago, someone sent me a video clip, saying “look my papa bois!” It was of a nature photographer, cleaning up bags and bags of garbage from the Aripo waterfall, a beautiful site in the Northern Range.
Rum and beer bottles, plastic water bottles, fast food boxes; he was grimly collecting them and grumbling that he couldn’t understand why anyone could visit such a space and defile it so casually.
Good soul that he is, he was even saying that if they could down so much alcohol, it wasn’t safe for them to be swimming.
What can we say to people who don’t give a damn?
Should we tell them that these creations of nature have been around far longer than they have, and they have no right to bring their nastiness into these spaces?
It feels like a greater violation when you see the careless degradation of beautiful spots, but the truth is that everywhere is sacred, and requires our collective protection.
There is a current campaign about being environment warriors, I think. A young man tosses a bottle, and a girl reprimands him. “Da is small ting, man,” he says dismissively. She reminds him that the small things add up.
We’ve had many public education campaigns over the years, from childhood I recall some. Chase Charlie Away, about pollution; a road safety one: Look, look to the right, look to the left and right once more; Breaking the Silence, about sexual abuse; recent Covid ones; dengue; banking; Facebook shopping…
It’s not as though there have not been several efforts to bring information to the public’s attention.
It is a natural response to ask for more public education campaigns to be instituted by the state. But we have to be practical.
What are the most effective platforms to get people’s attention? It’s hard to imagine how to reach people on such a massive scale. Newspapers, radio, online platforms, dropping leaflets into mailboxes; the scope is daunting simply on the premise of the volume.
Then you have to create messages in an interesting way; you have to grab attention. I remember Charlie because it was striking.
The challenge is greater now because people spread themselves so thinly over various media that they absorb nothing. It seems to be mindless surfing with no pause for reflection.
In that case, what kind of public education campaign can encourage us to think about the consequences of our actions? Can a blockhead unblock a drain?
Vaneisa Baksh is a columnist with the Trinidad Express, an editor and a cricket historian. She is the author of a biography of Sir Frank Worrell.
