Every day Brenda Harry, 30, totes a hammock with her when she goes to her vegetable shed on the Clarke Rochard Road junction, Penal, a stone’s throw from Barrackpore. The hammock is for her eight-month old baby.
Harry, a mother of four, hangs the hammock from two poles under the shed, feeds baby Adesh and puts him to sleep inside it.
“There is no one to see about him,” she said.
With a bright smile, she begins her day’s work, selling produce she reaped from her garden and bought from wholesalers, and bottles of pepper sauce she made. Her husband, Deoraj, joins her to sell cascadoux he journeyed to the other side of the island to catch in the swamps of Kernaham, Manzanilla, and other fish he got working on someone’s boat out at sea.
This rural area in South Trinidad once revolved around the sugar cane industry and was a beehive of economic activity with thriving mini marts, parlours, bars vegetable vendors and other small businesses. Today, 13 years after the closure of the sugar cane industry, the area is like a ghost town.
For Harry and Deoraj, some days are good and some are not.
“People catching their tail but we trying. Some days we buss. The goods don’t sell and they spoil. Others days are better. But we doing this for now, until better can be done.”
Prioritising the family’s needs and stringent budgeting are a must with their small earnings.
“We don’t even have a TV home right now. We had an old one that broke down and whenever I plan to buy one, one of the children would want a pair of shoes, a book bag, and I leave out the TV.”
For entertainment in the quiet village, Harry’s three older children, five, eight and 12, play “school” using an old refrigerator under the house for a blackboard.
“They write with markers on the fridge and then rub it off, teaching one another like if they are in a classroom,” she said.
“They are learning. I not hurry to buy the TV.
“I want my children to have a good education and get good jobs. I don’t want them to see trouble like me.”
Harry gladly goes daily with Deoraj into the forest more than five miles from her Clarke Rochard home to tend to and reap what she described as “fast crop” in their garden.
“We plant crops that would come up fast, like celery, chive, lettuce, patchoi, ochro. This morning I pick ochro from the garden,” she said, pointing to the large pile of fresh, green ochroes on the counter of her stall.
Sometimes during the day, Harry leaves Deoraj and the baby in the stall and goes home a few miles away to help prepare a meal for the other three children when they come from school.
“When I go home on evenings, I wash, iron clothes and see about the baby.”
Harry said she loves being her own boss and running her own business and this is what drives her.
“I used to cut grass with a weed whacker for Cepep. The boss would want me to cut three pole length up and three pole length down, the banks and the sides of the road. And at the end of the forthnight, I would get $1200.
“I am doing much better than that in my vegetable stall.”
Harry did domestic work too: “I was working for a lady, cleaning her house, cutting up all her vegetables to cook, cleaning her yard, washing down the fake swans in her yard and she would want to give me $80 for working more than eight hours a day.
“I felt I was doing plenty work for that.”
For many who have lost their jobs and are in no man’s land right now, Harry had some simple advice. “You have to look for something to do. Otherwise you will be unhappy and allhow.”