Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley has promised to initiate a special programme in Laventille schools that would require parents and teachers working together to raise the next generation on the right path. He will also bring back the Prime Minister’s Best Village competition so residents can express their talent and showcase their positivity.
Speaking on Saturday at the St Barb’s Basketball Court, Laventille, during the latest installment of I95.5FM’s Laventille Nights programme, Rowley said while the community had been stigmatised by crime, “it mattered not where you come from, but where you want to go, and how you intend to get there.”
He said when his mother left him in the care of his grandparents in Tobago at age one and moved to John John in Laventille, the community of Mason Hall assumed responsibility for him, monitored his behaviour and encouraged him to beat his books.
He won a scholarship and went to Jamaica to pursue his degree at the University of the West Indies. The first Christmas he spent away from home, he remembered eating a tin of baked beans, a sausage and “hard bread.”
“I cried myself to sleep but when I woke up I was a grown man because I promised to get my degree go back to Trinidad and Tobago and get a good job,” he said
Rowley said with ambition, the sky is the limit. He urged adults in Laventille to take responsibility for the young through guidance, mentoring and setting the right standards of behaviour. He said with the help of the State through a number of initiatives, the community can change.
“The people who grow up here will not see Laventille as a place to run from, but Laventille as a place to own as your home. How many people can leave Laventille and go elsewhere and make a living? A handful of successful ones. But the vast majority will have to remain and live in Laventille.
We have to fix it for those who remain here,” he said
Prime Minister Rowley said he recently advised Education Minister Anthony Garcia to introduce a special programme for Laventille schools starting with physical environment and security.
“You the parents, there will be a programme to identify you one by one, wherever or whoever you are, to bring you into this programme to assist to make sure that the school house and school place is the place where you begin working with the teachers to take responsibility for the next generation,” he said.
He added that teachers at schools in the community will be given extra help “because the schools in Laventille are not like the schools elsewhere in the country.”
Rowley told residents while as prime minister he has the authority to allow a lot of things to happen in Laventille, “it will mean nothing if you do not want to receive it. It will mean absolutely nothing.”
“We will put a marker on the ground today and choose a road that says our portion in this nation is not to kill one another, but to make others live,” he said.