Point Fortin Civic Centre
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Marlon Richardson Speaks - Pt 4
April 26, 2005
I got into politics almost by a fluke. At the time, there was a situation in my home village in Parrylands. There was a gas situation from a Petrotrin Plant. I sort of picked up the fight along with a teacher from the school and fought until Petrotrin had to relocate the children and shut down the plant. After that, I was asked to run for my area that was in the La Brea constituency. I went up for screening; I did not win the screening, but in the view of Mr. Manning, the then Mayor of Point Fortin and also Mr. Lawrence Achong, I do not know what happened, but I ended up on the Point Fortin Borough Council as an alderman and I have continued to work in the cultural field of Point Fortin since then. I have now become the Deputy Mayor and I am directly in charge of cultural celebrations, with Borough Day being part of it. That is basically my history as to how I ended up where I am at present.
A lot of the people in Point Fortin can trace their development through either cultural clubs or sporting clubs. There is a lot of club life in Point Fortin. In fact, the chamber we are now sitting in was a sports club. It was donated by Shell to the Borough to become our Town Hall. We have a history in Point Fortin of sporting clubs and cultural clubs. There was a member of council Mr. Valley, our local historian who can trace back all the clubs that were in Point Fortin. Every village had a club, so you would find the people of Point Fortin have developed in that manner. You always had an organization of structure, discipline, and you always had that sense of belonging to something. That is why you would find Point Fortin the way it is today. It is the cleanest borough; it has one of the lowest crime rates, and it is also a place where I could determine the last village town. If you walk through Point Fortin you will know if a person or a car is not from Point Fortin. The people of Point Fortin have grown up in a very structured kind of way with a discipline that we have continued.
Though there are fewer groups today, somehow the spirit is still there. Point Fortin always had a strong family structure and the village has always been the extended family. Even today if you go into the villages like Techier, New Village, Guapo, and if you listen to people like Errol Fabien, he will always talk about Guapo and his up bringing. It is where you would still have that country mentality. Like I would look out for my neighbor's child, or if I do not have something to eat today, I can go by my neighbor or my neighbor can come by me. To this very day, I can still go back to my village Parrylands, and eat in about four or five different houses and be perfectly comfortable. You grow up calling your neighbor aunty. If the guy on the block who is your brother's friend see you do something wrong, he would pull you up and hit you a 'clout' and say, no, that is the wrong thing to do. That is something we really have to treasure, because a lot has been lost in parts of Trinidad, and it is one of the things I think, that crime is built upon. We have to get back that level of discipline and look out for each other. When a village brings up a child, it helps to keep things in perspective.
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