AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Deputy Chief Sec­re­tary Dr Faith B Yis­rael blames a lack of rest for the so­cial me­dia post she made over the week­end.

Last Sat­ur­day, B Yis­rael took to Face­book af­ter re­ceiv­ing an ear­ly morn­ing call from a To­ba­go res­i­dent who had not been paid on time. She vent­ed her frus­tra­tions and in­struct­ed mem­bers of the pub­lic to “ease” her “up,” say­ing there was lit­tle she could do for cit­i­zens on the week­end.

In an in­ter­view with To­ba­go Up­dates yes­ter­day, B Yis­rael con­ced­ed that the post was a “lapse in judg­ment.”

“I ac­cept that that is some­thing that re­al­ly some­one in my po­si­tion should not have done, re­gard­less of how I felt about the sit­u­a­tion, re­gard­less of how tired I was…those were my sen­ti­ments at 6 am,” she said.

B Yis­rael said she had pre­vi­ous­ly as­sist­ed the per­son, who called her sev­er­al times at 6 am on Sat­ur­day, to get a job some months ago.

She said since then, the per­son had not tried to con­tact her again un­til Sat­ur­day, when they tried to reach her to com­plain that they had not been paid.

The post re­ceived over 100 com­ments on Face­book, with mul­ti­ple so­cial me­dia users con­demn­ing B Yis­rael for mak­ing the post, which al­so con­tained a screen­shot of her call log from that morn­ing.

Pro­gres­sive De­mo­c­ra­t­ic Pa­tri­ots (PDP) po­lit­i­cal leader Wat­son Duke com­ment­ed on B Yis­rael’s ac­tions, call­ing her out for “in­sult­ing To­bag­o­ni­ans.”

“It might be use­ful to keep in mind that be­hind the “EASE me up” calls are peo­ple that we pledge to rep­re­sent. Think for a mo­ment, why did they call so ear­ly and the per­son­al dis­tress they might be ex­pe­ri­enc­ing,” Duke said in a post.

But ac­cord­ing to B Yis­rael, she has no is­sue ad­dress­ing the com­plaints of cit­i­zens but on­ly want­ed to re­mind the pub­lic that “we do not have con­trol over every­thing that hap­pens with­in our di­vi­sions.”

“We are all hu­man be­ings. And that, you know, we have these feel­ings, we have all of these emo­tions, we have all of these ex­pres­sions. And it is what it is. So, I sin­cere­ly apol­o­gise for post­ing it.”