Sascha Wil­son

Des­per­ate to re­turn home fol­low­ing the death of his moth­er and the con­di­tion of his sev­en-month preg­nant wife, a T&T na­tion­al in Suri­name has made an ur­gent re­quest to Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young for an ex­emp­tion for en­try.

Ken King Fook was one of sev­en Trinida­di­ans work­ing in Suri­name when this coun­try’s bor­ders closed and who now want to re­turn home. Their em­ploy­er has al­ready made arrange­ments to char­ter a flight to bring them home and they are will­ing to foot the quar­an­tine costs if nec­es­sary.

King Fook said the group was un­able to re­turn with an ini­tial batch of their com­pa­tri­ots who re­turned home on May 1 be­cause they were still con­trac­tu­al­ly ob­lig­at­ed to their com­pa­ny. His oblig­a­tion end­ed at the end of May and he had ini­tial­ly been pre­pared to wait un­til the bor­ders re­opened un­til his fam­i­ly is­sues arose.

In a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, King Fook ex­plained, “Ow­ing to the sit­u­a­tion of my wife’s now high-risk preg­nan­cy and then my moth­er’s sud­den pass­ing, that is the rea­son why we are now look­ing to get the ex­emp­tions for en­try in­to Trinidad.”

King Fook, his com­pa­ny and rel­a­tives have sent sev­er­al re­quests for ex­emp­tion but all been de­nied by Young.

Ex­plain­ing why it is im­por­tant for him to re­turn home, King Fook, in his email to the min­is­ter, said his moth­er died three weeks ago and is in a fu­ner­al home as rel­a­tives await his re­turn and his wife is due to give birth in Au­gust but the stress and men­tal fa­tigue as a re­sult of the sit­u­a­tion is putting the ba­by at risk.

“With re­spect, dear Min­is­ter, it is very con­fus­ing to me and dif­fi­cult to un­der­stand how ex­emp­tions are be­ing grant­ed to oth­er na­tion­als who have sim­ply ‘been away too long’ on a dai­ly ba­sis, while mine is re­peat­ed­ly de­nied giv­en the afore­men­tioned rea­sons and al­so con­tra­dict­ing the state­ment that was made on 27-MAY-20 stat­ing ‘all’ na­tion­als would be al­lowed en­try in­to T&T on a ‘man­aged ba­sis’ with the nec­es­sary re­quire­ments met. I em­pathise with every sin­gle na­tion­al at­tempt­ing a re­turn to T&T, but how many of them have dire cir­cum­stances as out­lined above?” King Fook wrote in his re­quest.

King Fook’s sis­ter-in-law Richelle De Souza al­so yes­ter­day ap­pealed to Young to be com­pas­sion­ate and al­low him to re­turn home in her re­quest.

When con­tact­ed via What­sApp yes­ter­day, Young re­called that last month na­tion­als in Suri­name were al­lowed to re­turn, were quar­an­tined on their re­turn and have since been re­unit­ed with their fam­i­lies.

How­ev­er, he said, they have been work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to man­age the re­turn of all na­tion­als abroad.

“This ex­er­cise re­quires a care­ful bal­anc­ing of the num­bers that can be quar­an­tined by the state to en­sure that any pos­si­ble re-im­por­ta­tion of COVID-19 does not over­whelm our pub­lic health sys­tem des­ig­nat­ed for COVID cas­es,” Young said.

“We are very sym­pa­thet­ic to the thou­sands of our na­tion­als who wish to re­turn to Trinidad and To­ba­go. Each na­tion­al has his/her own set of cir­cum­stances which con­tain per­son­al dif­fi­cul­ties and it is a dif­fi­cult task to man­age these thou­sands of re­quests.”

Young said they are cur­rent­ly man­ag­ing the re­turn of na­tion­als from Guyana, Venezuela, cruise ships, oil rigs and stu­dents in Ja­maica and Bar­ba­dos.

“The num­ber of na­tion­als in these cat­e­gories are in the hun­dreds,” Young said, adding that care­ful man­age­ment of the re­turn of na­tion­als is crit­i­cal to pro­tect the pop­u­la­tion, in­clud­ing those in quar­an­tine fa­cil­i­ties.