- NEWSDAY.CO.TT - A la Une - Hier 13:46

PNM MPs tell Beetham: We’ve experienced poverty

AS they lamented the termination of the jobs of Cepep, forestry and other workers, several opposition MPs said they too had experienced poverty in their early lives, in a seeming bid to express empathy with the now-unemployed workers which the opposition has estimated to be 20,000 individuals. They spoke at a PNM rally at Beetham Community Centre, Port of Spain, on July 10, headed by Opposition Leader Pennelope Beckles. Laventille West MP Kareem Marcelle, who was heartily hailed by Beckles and other speakers for becoming an attorney despite his humble upbringing, testified that as a boy when he did not have money to go to school, it was the Beetham Gardens community that had sent him to school. He said he had many relatives and neighbours who earned their livelihood from Cepep. St Ann’s East MP and former education minister Dr Nyan Gadsby-Dolly said that when she had to start off in school, her mother had to pawn her wedding ring to get money to buy a school uniform for her. Dolly said that same uniform had to last her throughout her school years, with successive seamstress alterations rather than her family being able to constantly be buying her new uniforms. “When I passed common entrance, the Friday before school started in September, my mother pawned her wedding ring to buy me a school uniform. If I ain’t have the uniform, don’t talk for the books, right? “I wore that uniform for five years of SAGHS (St Augustine Girls High School). Five years. That one uniform.” “So today, I felt heavy today, because I understand what it feels like.” Beckles, an attorney who is MP for Arima, testified that she had grown up in a home that lacked electricity and a pipe-borne supply of water. Opposition senator Dr Amery Browne, a former Diego Martin Central MP and former foreign affairs minister related an enthralling story of student poverty he had coped with when studying to become a medical doctor. Spelling out the abbreviation “KFC” one letter at a time, he said the fast-food franchise had been his employer and in this had helped him making it through medical school, financially. “I am proud of it!” he shouted, saying many PNM MPs had come from humble backgrounds. “Now of course I wasn’t telling many of my schoolmates what I was doing as a side job.” He recalled a hilarious incident when he was a KFC delivery driver when he was called out on a delivery to a certain address. “As I opened the door I realised it was a student group of my classmates, who had ordered dinner and who was coming to deliver? Young Amery Browne, with a bag of hot KFC.” While Browne admitted to the PNM crowd the discomfort he had felt at that time, he said in retrospect he realised he should not have felt bad for earning an honest dollar. Several politicians had previously spoke about their humble upbringings. Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has spoken often about going to school without being able to afford shoes, and then having to be a waitress at age 16 when she had gone to England to study. Former prime minister Dr Keith Rowley also recalled his days as a barefoot schoolchild, in Tobago, raised on his grandfather’s small farm. Former prime minister the late Patrick Manning had spoken of having to go to school not in a boy’s shirt but rather in the hand-me-down blouse of an older sister, when an altered collar being inadequate to disguise the garmet’s origins and spare him from teasing. The post PNM MPs tell Beetham: We’ve experienced poverty appeared first on Trinidad and Tobago Newsday.