PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@

guardian.co.tt

“Our na­tion­als in Wash­ing­ton DC are safe.”

This was the as­sur­ance of Trinidad and To­ba­go Am­bas­sador to Wash­ing­ton and the Or­gan­i­sa­tion of Amer­i­can States An­tho­ny Phillip Spencer yes­ter­day fol­low­ing the protests at Capi­tol Hill yes­ter­day.

“We are all safe, our fam­i­lies are safe and we now are fo­cused on look­ing out that oth­er mem­bers of our di­as­po­ra com­mu­ni­ty them­selves are al­so do­ing well,” said the Am­bas­sador in a phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day.

He de­scribed yes­ter­day’s events, which even­tu­al­ly saw the US Capi­tol placed on a 12-hour cur­few from 6 pm yes­ter­day to 6 am to­day as ex­tra­or­di­nary.

“The mood is re­flec­tive of events that have re­al­ly been ex­tra­or­di­nary. So there is by and large, a recog­ni­tion by just about every­one at all lev­els of so­ci­ety that this is not a usu­al event. It is very ex­cep­tion­al. And so I don’t have to tell any­one what is re­port­ed al­ready. But by and large, folks have been try­ing to come to terms with what has tran­spired,” he said.

“They fo­cused on see­ing how one stays safe, en­sur­ing that we look out for each oth­er par­tic­u­lar­ly you know here in Wash­ing­ton DC, and the DC Mary­land, Vir­ginia area we have quite a large com­mu­ni­ty of our own na­tion­als and cit­i­zens here in the di­as­po­ra. So we have been reach­ing out to them, they have been reach­ing out to us and by and large I have al­so sent a mes­sage out to the Trinidad and To­ba­go di­as­po­ra as­so­ci­a­tions net­work.”

“I know in Trinidad we are all con­cerned we are ex­press­ing and ex­tend­ing our thought­ful and prayer­ful sol­i­dar­i­ty and sup­port,” he said.

The am­bas­sador, how­ev­er, said it was too soon to say if the sit­u­a­tion in Wash­ing­ton would nor­malise by to­day.

“I think by and large we are all look­ing for­ward to some type of re­turn to nor­mal­cy overnight. There is no im­me­di­ate sign that is achieved so I can’t pre­dict what will hap­pen. But that is the out­look but we con­tin­ue to await the fur­ther de­ci­sion from the may­or and the DC gov­ern­ment con­cern­ing the cur­few that is in ef­fect now.”