Catholic Commission for Social Justice
By Leela Ramdeen, Chair, CCSJ & Director, CREDI
Today is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. As baptised Catholics, we belong to the Family of the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We were created out of love to love, teaching others to follow God’s commandments, the greatest of which is LOVE.
As we prepare to observe Indian Arrival Day tomorrow (May 30), let us use this opportunity to thank God for the resilience of our forebears. As Desmond Tutu said, “You don’t choose your family, they are God’s gift to you, as you are to them.” Sadly, many of us have failed to document the history of our ancestors.
My maternal grandfather, Robert Henry Fitzgerald Manning, came to Trinidad from Barbados and my maternal grandmother, Enid Nicome, originated from Venezuela. Though we don’t know much about their history before they arrived here, my family has some knowledge of the history of my paternal forebears.
“The political and social climate that prevails in the world today emphasises difference, disunity, and destruction rather than the qualities of unity and productive and constructive energy that are required to sustain human societies. These negative processes and forces have perpetuated our alienation from the basic material roots of our existence, the natural world of which we are a part”. —Roxande Lalonde (Unity in Diversity: Acceptance and Integration in an Era of Intolerance and Fragmentation, MA Thesis, 1994)
On Wednesday, May 30, the nation will observe the 173rd anniversary of Indians arriving in T&T. Like Lalonde, I believe that we can have “unity without uniformity and diversity without fragmentation”.