Angels among us – Through a woman’s eyes

Every once in a while, a well-meaning friend or relative forwards me a chain email which says that angels are watching over me or that the email itself represents an angel. No matter how it starts it usually ends exhorting me to send it on to a number of people in order to receive a miracle in ten minutes or the next day or week. Its dire warning usually is that if I do not forward the email I would have several years of bad luck.

Ovena Braithwaite
Ovena Braithwaite

Well I very often have to opt for the latter, as there are rarely enough hours in the day to complete the things I must do, particularly when there are deadlines looming. So far, however (fingers crossed), my luck has not been that bad.

There is one email that I have seen several times, which tells a story about a person whose car stalls at a gas station. This enables her/him to encounter and assist a needy mother of three. Of course the car starts like it never had a problem once the good deed is done.

The story reminds me of one we highlighted in this newspaper last week – Ovena Braithwaite’s story.

Young, dirt poor, unwell and with two and a half children, Ovena must have felt that she was slipping off the edge of a precipice when her spouse disappeared some two months ago. Neighbours have attested to the fact that Clive Mariano was not the typical husband. He and Ovena and their children clearly lived below the poverty line, but every morning he cooked, washed and fetched water before he left for work, obviously because he did not want Ovena, whose eyesight is failing, to hurt herself trying to complete these tasks while he was away.

Then he fell ill, was taken to hospital and vanished, seemingly into thin air. The earth beneath Ovena’s feet must have started to crumble then. But into the breach stepped three people who so obviously personify good neighbourliness. Ann Davidson, Daphne Archer and Lynette Wong all have families of their own; none of them are rich. Perhaps the only things that set them apart from Ovena are that their houses are sturdier than hers and their eyesight better. Difficult though it is, they assist Ovena as best as they know how, ensuring that she and her children are not starving and trying to help her to find her husband.

The latter proves exceptionally hard and Ovena’s situation worsens when a thunderstorm grabs the roof off her shack/home, exposing her and her children to the elements. Clive Mariano was a carpenter before he disappeared; the women knew he would have found a way to fix the roof. In desperation, because in addition to having lost the sole breadwinner of her family, Ovena has now lost her place of abode, one of the women travels to Georgetown to have the missing persons’ report publicized.

However, it is the little she lets on about Ovena that strikes a chord in us and others.

Our reporter travels to Yarrow-kabra and the minute we publish the story, there is an outpouring of offers of assistance for Ovena. In a matter of hours, she receives tangible support with the promise of more help from Gafoors and its employees as well as other individuals.

Overwhelmed as she is at discovering that people do care, Ovena’s joy would probably be more complete if the police also put their best feet forward in discovering what has happened to her spouse.

We also learned, in putting Ovena’s story together, that she has no birth certificate. Her neighbour Ann Davidson has been trying to get one for her, to no avail. Since the General Registrar’s Office has explained ad nauseam how simple this process is, I suppose it could be that Ovena’s birth was never registered. She says she is 23 years old, but has no actual proof of this. She looks younger and may very well be.

What this also reveals, however, is that Ovena would not have been accounted for in the just completed house-to-house registration process, for which one needed a birth certificate as well as photo ID. I wonder now about the last population census. Was she counted then? I also cannot help but question whether her two children have birth certificates and have been immunized as her three-year-old daughter will soon be ready for nursery school. Or has this entire family fallen through the cracks?

How many more Ovenas are there around the country?

As I ponder this, a sister tells me of a family in another highway community. In this instance, it is a single-parent father struggling with seven children between the ages of around 17 and nine years old.

Their mother died some eight years ago, leaving the three girls and four boys. Only one of them, the youngest, has a birth certificate. However, the sister said, the others were immunized, have clinic cards and they have all attended school off and on, for varying periods.

The eldest, a girl, has recently had a baby herself and gone off to live with the father of her child. The two youngest are girls and they and the others must fend for themselves when their father goes to work as his job, through which he barely makes enough to feed them, takes him out of the community for days at a time. They too get help from kindly neighbours and handouts from church organizations.

Still, there is need for greater intervention if these children and others like them are to have a chance of getting off the poverty cycle. Were systems working, the children mentioned above and the fact that they were not registered at birth would have been brought to the attention of the relevant authorities.

Their infrequent attendance at school would have sent welfare officers into the community, where they quite likely may also have found other children in similar circumstances. It is not enough for us to regurgitate statistics about how many people are now above the poverty line, when it is clear that too many of our poorest people are invisible. And were it not for the angels among us, they would never be seen.