SHANE SU­PERVILLE

Se­nior Re­porter

shane.su­perville@guardian.co.tt

Ro­man Catholic Vic­ar Gen­er­al Fr Mar­tin Sir­ju says he has seen first­hand the ef­fects of eco­nom­ic hard­ship in and around Port-of-Spain, not­ing an in­crease in the num­ber of peo­ple seek­ing the church’s help to ob­tain ba­sic ne­ces­si­ties in re­cent times.

Fr Sir­ju raised these con­cerns and oth­ers dur­ing his open­ing re­marks at an in­ter­faith ser­vice com­mem­o­rat­ing the 112th an­niver­sary of the Port-of-Spain City Cor­po­ra­tion at the Cathe­dral of the Im­mac­u­late Con­cep­tion on Char­lotte Street yes­ter­day.

He re­ferred to the life of John the Bap­tist, who car­ried out his min­istry in the wilder­ness, de­scrib­ing the mod­ern wilder­ness as one marked by fi­nan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties and oth­er chal­lenges.

He not­ed that a re­cent ex­am­ple of eco­nom­ic hard­ship emerged at a vo­ca­tion­al school opened by the Catholic Church in Sea Lots, where at­ten­dance de­clined no­tice­ably.

“We had a cer­tain num­ber of stu­dents that were go­ing and then all of a sud­den, the num­ber of stu­dents dropped and the num­ber of stu­dents dropped be­cause their par­ents lost their jobs.

“Al­so ... eight years in Port-of-Spain and more peo­ple are hun­gry this year com­pared to the oth­er years that I’ve been here. More peo­ple com­ing for food and things like that.”

De­spite these hard­ships, Sir­ju said con­fronting the chal­lenges of this metaphor­i­cal wilder­ness re­quired deep re­flec­tion and a stronger con­nec­tion with God to find the strength to per­se­vere.

He there­fore urged the pub­lic not to be­come over­whelmed by the chal­lenges of mod­ern life.

“If in the wilder­ness you al­low the things of the wilder­ness to get to you, you will be­come an­gry, you will be­come rest­less, you wouldn’t sleep well, your blood pres­sure will go up and you might get a heart at­tack.”

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia af­ter a post-pa­rade re­cep­tion at Port-of-Spain City Hall on Knox Street, May­or Chin­ua Al­leyne agreed that he and oth­er mem­bers of the cor­po­ra­tion had seen an in­crease in re­quests for as­sis­tance from peo­ple in need.

“I see the pub­lic every Thurs­day and I have seen a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in the num­ber of per­sons com­ing to City Hall seek­ing food sup­port, and my col­leagues who are coun­cil­lors have al­so seen an in­crease in per­sons go­ing to their of­fices in their elec­toral dis­tricts, whether it be for ham­pers or any­thing food-re­lat­ed.

“There is def­i­nite­ly that hap­pen­ing. We give as much sup­port as we can. We are not the lead agency where that is con­cerned, but we have a so­cial re­spon­si­bil­i­ty and we try our best to ful­fil it for as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble.”