Long hours with faulty equipment

I am dissatisfied with the performance of the management of the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA).

Since 2001 when a new management team took office, the employees have suffered great hardships. They have been working long hours with dilapidated and faulty equipment. Nothing has been done for the employees’ comfort or their well-being. The equipment being used at present should have been replaced years ago but instead it is still in service today.

Although Piarco provides air traffic control services for the entire Caribbean, it lacks basic equipment. Piarco has been without radar facilities for the last five years and there seems to be no sign of new equipment in the near future.

Most other islands of the eastern Caribbean however have radar surveillance available.

For years the air traffic controllers have been working under substandard conditions both at the Piarco area control building and at the Piarco tower, yet they have maintained a standard of safety that has never been compromised.

The CAA employees are understaffed, underpaid and fed up. Their morale is at an all-time low. It is sad to say but the staff has nobody to turn to in their time of need. The Public Service Association, which is the designated representative, has neglected the air traffic controllers’ needs and wants.

Mark Govierre

Port-of-Spain

PM, start seeking people’s interest

Open letter to Prime Minister Patrick Manning:

I must say I am very disappointed in you. The Vision 2020 I think has gone blind.

In school I learned that the Government of our country is elected by the people, for the people, but your party is marching on by itself. Your Government has forgotten the very people you promised so much to. Your party was once about the people and their needs, but you have lost sight of that.

How can you see such crises in the country, like criminals running rampant, sky-high food prices, farmlands being decimated, bare necessities for citizens are unaffordable, yet you go ahead with whatever your heart desires?

If citizens’ lives are to improve, your present mindset will not work.

Also, global warming is becoming a disastrous truth. Yet what does our Government do? It busies itself settling agreements to construct three smelter plants and destroying our mangroves for a steel mill.

It doesn’t even care about our endangered and fragile wild animals whose numbers are struggling terribly. The PNM’s plans will further frustrate mother nature, despite so many international and local warnings.

Is it that your countrymen’s concerns have fallen on impenetrable ears? You need to take care of your citizens, Mr PM!

Global warming has disabled so many countries worldwide. Changing weather patterns have caused our food sources to run low. What if they cease altogether?

Let’s protect our land and use it well. We can push food prices down if we use our lush lands to produce food and not factories. Food can become affordable again.

Now to my fellow Trinis: if we love our country we can stop this state of decay. We must continue to tell our Prime Minister that there are solutions to every problem, this is our country, and he was put there by us. Seek our interest, Mr Prime Minister.

B Maraj

Port-of-Spain

Regular checks of bridge needed

The collapse of the Bailey bridge over the Caroni River indicates to me a lack of maintenance or overloading of the bridge.

In previous years before the reorganisation of the Ministry of Works, an engineer in charge of each district. These engineers had the responsibility of inspecting each bridge in their district at least once a month and recording their condition.

The chief design engineer, Curtis Knight, also inspected these bridges throughout the island regularly.

Any maintenance to be done was urgently carried out. Bridges were regularly painted and components of Bailey bridges, kept at the mechanical workshop, were inspected from time to time by Knight to determine durability.

There was co-operation between the engineer and the superintendent of police in the district with respect to overloaded vehicles that had to use the bridges.

In the years that I worked in the Ministry of Works as an engineer, I cannot recall anyone being killed or injured due to the collapse of a bridge.

Let us pay more attention to our bridges, roads, buildings, rivers, drains, etc.

C Taylor

St Augustine

Govt presiding over decadence

Our Government presides over a state of decadence in Trinidad and appears to be oblivious of this.

Many of our streets and parks in Port-of-Spain smell with stench. Mounds of rubbish litter the streets of the capital and also Diego Martin. Our historic buildings are either in a state of collapse or show off their crumbling walls. Mille Fleurs, snatched from lawyers years ago, has fallen further into disrepair.

Walk along Abercromby Street and see the trees and shrubs growing out of the walls of our national wonder, the Red House, which has been displaying temporary steel support for the better part of a decade. That is the home of our Parliament. We have a President’s House at which the President can only gaze but not enter for more than five years.

Dengue fever and tuberculosis make regular appearances on doctor’s diagnoses. Murders by the day is the most notable feature of our accomplishments.

When will we understand that while we swim in and waste our oil and gas dollars we have no standards? Our quality of life is rapidly deteriorating to the extent where we are happy with stench, disease, decay and murder.

Wake up, T&T, before it is too late!

Clint David

Woodbrook, PoS

Send spray after those mosquitoes

Listening to Health Minister Jerry Narace put his spin on dengue is sickening in itself.

One hundred and twenty cases are too many. In fact one case is cause for concern, and even though the total figure for 2008 may be lower than previous years, this is not a comfort that one in his position should seek.

Do we need more cases or deaths to warrant the preventative spraying of mosquitoes?

I cannot believe that this Government with its vast resources—enough to send planes for visiting dignitaries and build countless grandiose buildings—cannot find the “small money” it takes to spray mosquitoes.

In the 1970s and 80s, this was done regularly every rainy season and we were much further from developed country back then.

Send out the spray trucks. What is the keep back?

C Alexander

Via e-mail

Teach youth to say no to sex until marriage

I acknowledge that it is a wise decision to be tested for HIV/Aids if you are sexually active outside of a mutually faithful marriage relationship. However, there is little chance of stopping HIV and Aids by asking ad nauseum “are you sexually active?” without giving some moral guidelines that sex is meant to be reserved for marriage.

Young people hearing this ad over and over and over can hardly be faulted if they think that there is no criterion to being sexually active apart from being tested to see if you have picked up some disease. Is this what we have reduced sex to?

Sex and sexuality are gifts from God who has made us male and female, created us in His own image and likeness, with the capacity to love deeply through making a sincere gift of self to another. Love is our final end. Nothing else can satisfy the human heart for we have been created by God who loves us beyond compare and who invites us to share in His love forever in Heaven.

To prepare ourselves for Heaven we must learn how to love. This life is a preparation for that time and one of the primary ways that men and women can grow in love is something that is very natural for us—through marriage and family life. Sexual intercourse belongs in marriage of a husband and wife. That is God’s plan for us as men and women.

Our very bodies are created with the capacity of expressing love through the sexual embrace in which a man and a woman can make a gift of self to the other, expressing their love in the marital embrace which makes them one—a love that is designed by God to be free, total, fruitful and faithful.

If the “love” is forced, temporary, sterile and/or promiscuous, it really is not love at all but lust or violence.

How much better to educate our youth that it really is worthwhile to practise chastity and to save sex for marriage. In this way they will be encouraged, perhaps even made aware for the first time that this really is possible and very beneficial to them.

Why not hold up to them the practice of self-control and encourage them to build discipline in their lives, in line with that displayed by those amazing athletes who have trained every day for years to participate at the Olympics?

Let us encourage our youth to practise discipline for life. Let us help them to recognise the huge benefit of abstinence or to resolve to begin again through secondary virginity until they are ready for marriage.

Let us tell them the benefits of entering marriage, the possibility of forging a life-long union with a beloved spouse, the advantage of beginning without bringing any baggage into the marriage, the baggage of disease, abortion, broken hearts, lies and being used, which casual sex implies and promotes.

Young people, don’t be duped. You are much more than your emotions or instincts. You are also in possession of a will that needs to be exercised and which is your highest faculty for determining your future.

Use your will power to decide for a future of hope, goodness, beauty and love and freedom from STDs. Walk away from lust, from being used and abused. Your life is too precious.

You have been created for eternity. God who made you without your co-operation will not save you without your co-operation. You choose. It is your life. What will it be, heaven or hell? Pray and ask God to guide you. The Lord is very near.

Susan Henry,

Via e-mail

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