Joel Julien

joel.julien@guardian.co.tt

Pen­ny­wise Cos­met­ics Ltd wants to re­pair T&T, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer Dalvi Paladee has said.

In fact, Paladee said that is the rea­son why the com­pa­ny is in ex­is­tence.

Paladee made the state­ment yes­ter­day dur­ing the of­fi­cial open­ing of the Pen­ny­wise Plaza lo­cat­ed along the Narsa­loo Ra­maya Marg Road in Ch­agua­nas.

The plaza in­cludes over a dozen stores such a the Pen­ny­wise Su­per­store and Phar­ma­cy, Stan­dards, the Home Store and Rat­tan’s Out­let Deals.

Paladee said since the com­pa­ny’s hum­ble be­gin­nings in the Ch­agua­nas mar­ket close to 40 years ago, its pur­pose has been to help peo­ple. And so Pen­ny­wise has been work­ing qui­et­ly to help those in need around the coun­try in­clud­ing, in some in­stances, build­ing homes for them.

“We no­tice that T&T bleeds, every sin­gle per­son in this room politi­cian and oth­er­wise is see­ing Trinidad is bleed­ing.

“We are see­ing Trinidad hurt; this T&T is hurt­ing, al­most dai­ly some­thing is hap­pen­ing,” Paladee said.

He said his com­pa­ny will try to heal that hurt.

“The rea­son Pen­ny­wise ex­ists is to re­pair this coun­try. We are go­ing to do every­thing we can with God’s grace to try and get this coun­try right. Every­body wants that. Too many things are wrong, too many things seem to be un­fit and too many peo­ple are hurt­ing and the hurt shows in how we re­act with each oth­er,” he said.

Paladee said the com­pa­ny has been work­ing in com­mu­ni­ties like Sea Lots, Beetham Gar­dens and Windy Hill in Arou­ca.

He said dur­ing Pen­ny­wise’s nine years work­ing in the Windy Hill com­mu­ni­ty there were on­ly two mur­ders.

Be­fore there was a mur­der tak­ing place every three weeks in Windy Hill, he said.

Paladee said Pen­ny­wise is go­ing to use its re­sources “to go af­ter that big­ger change at the macro lev­el.”

Agri­cul­ture Min­is­ter Clarence Ramb­harat, along with Mem­bers of the Op­po­si­tion such as Ch­agua­nas West MP Gan­ga Singh, Ch­agua­nas East MP Fazal Karim and St Au­gus­tine MP Prakash Ra­mad­har were present at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny.