“Experience dulls the edges of all our dogmas.”
Gilbert Murray
As I closed one chapter of my life, someone else started
a whole new book.
“Trinidad has lost another one of its best sons. We
need more people like David. It’s a real pity. But he’ll
blossom somewhere else—in a more forward-thinking country
where he’s given opportunities Trinidad never can.”
My sister’s words could not have been better said.
It was, indeed, our loss, not his.
My friend David made good on his long-kept promise to travel
abroad, for good—to work, to study, to play, and to live
the life he always knew he needed.
There’s a tacit understanding among UWI students that,
while we feel we’re the ones who made it, that’s
not necessarily so. Most of us know that, had we been smarter
and luckier—and wealthier—we’d be reading for
degrees somewhere far, far away from St Augustine.
There were town boys in Fatima who knew, no matter what
their A-level grades, they had a ticket to England waiting
for them in daddy’s briefcase.
And then there were fellas in Pres who knew they didn’t
even have to do A-levels because SATs were their ticket to
a bigger, brighter, better place.
It’s no wonder the Government gives the best scholarships
for foreign study that “open” up one’s opportunities
to bigger, brighter and better things than this little place—which
constructs billion-dollar tsunami shelters—can offer.
So it’s not uncommon to hear UWI students talking about
doing their master’s abroad, about taking a work visa
to some place, about going elsewhere to get what they need.
And those who can do just that.Global village
David was always a worldly sort of fellow. He’d travelled
a lot, studied abroad, and even did a student exchange in
Spain. His mind and eyes were open to world of career opportunity,
of enhanced standards of living, of progressive lifestyles,
and of culture, history and people as varied and extensive
as this global village is vast.
In this day and age—when a phone can take a picture
halfway around the world and transfer it wirelessly and instantly
to someone in Palo Seco to see, when even squatters have satellite
television—our eyes and minds are opened every day to
a surplus of prospects for broadening our horizons and experiences
and growth.
Imagine living it.
So when David returned to Trinidad after completing a degree
that is even not offered at a UWI campus, he was, needless
to say, disappointed.
Apparently, T&T wasn’t ready for his qualifications.
For years he trudged through interviews for positions for
which he was either too qualified or not appropriately qualified,
and piss-poor jobs for loathsome companies that held him to
illegal contracts for next-to-nothing pay.
It took three years before he found a position he could
really fill, and even then it had nothing to do with his course
of study.
The job, however, gave him the chance to travel. And it
was on those brief trips that he felt a longing—a desire
for something bigger, brighter and better that he could not
find in Trinidad. There was an excitement out there, where
opportunities were limitless and dreams took living shape.
It was the existence of possibility.Nationalistic dogma
But there’s a price to pay even for the ubiquitous
desire to dream—for challenging that nationalistic dogma
of there being only one home for every person. Look at Nobel
Naipaul. Nuff said.
Suddenly there is a fanatical nationalism when Trinis fly
away.
Why you go want to leave this place? This is land of your
birth. We’ve given you everything, and now you pack up
and leave? Like a prodigal son who milks his mother to the
last drop and leaves her high and dry and all alone?
Where is your sense of responsibility? Where is your sense
of country? Everyone has only one home.
But is that true? In today’s shrinking global village,
where even our jockey-shorts are made half-way around the
world, are we traitors simply for moving to another corner
of the village?
There’s only so many times I could go to MovieTowne,
David used to say.
Indeed, our illusion of wealth, our false sense of affluence
and our massive “we reach” mantra have taken the
place of discipline, production and tolerance. And it has
bred little more than a repetition of borrowed, mass-produced,
artificial symbols of prosperity and possibility.
The colonel, the place where it’s always Friday and
the velvet rope of every fleeting hotspot we would kill to
get into make us feel as though there is no need to go anywhere
else because everything has come to us.
But any bright young person would say that’s not true.
And we also know that it is a duty to our personal growth
that, once there’s an opportunity to experience something
and somewhere else, we should take it.
People call it brain drain. But, some would ask, what is
there to funnel us back to the source once we’re gone?
