Dear Editor,
During the last election campaign I constantly advocated out with the old and in with the new. History shows who are the old, so I do not have to specify who they are.
But what I know is that many many years now I have been saying that there is nothing wrong with copying the good thing. Tourism did not start on Sint Maarten, so we have copied that from somewhere.
In the paper of May 24, I read an article on the front page which made me sad. Sad because it is totally the fault of government whose members have been there for many many years and have done nothing. The article stated by and large provided evidence shows that there are insufficient skilled laborers on the local labor market to meet the demand for skills in several industries. This is something that I wrote to you about in March of this year under the heading “There have never been professionals here.” This is sad.
Over the years I have had all kinds of conversations with members of government who instead of putting these ideas in the back of their heads for the future, tried to explain why it could not be done. One of those conversations was sending our youth to the Bushiri Hotel on Aruba which is a hotel training school. I will challenge any one of them to show me if they have made use of the Bushiri Hotel.
In 1995 we had a similar experience as with Irma and a whole lot of people who worked in the casinos found out that they were good tradesmen.
What did we do with Milton Peters College?
Do we really feel at home to rest on our laurels, knowing that we live in the hurricane belt and eventually will need skilled tradesmen? Instead of letting the people know what is going to happen to avoid this kind of predicament we are again dedicating our time in the paper to justify why we will have to continue importing cheap labour.
There are several programs in place that offer a combination of job-training and paid employment. Job-seekers have the opportunity to learn new skills and join new trades. The NIPA and White and Yellow Cross have also sent several persons to Trinidad for training Because of the urgency can I think that they are the first available ones? Are we going to continue sending our youth to Trinidad in the future? Are we going to enhance what is happening at the Vocational School and Milton Peters College?
My question is also what is more expensive? To educate your people and have them on hand, or create a bigger immigration problem which, as we know, is not conducive to the face of the island.
When I hear the amount of fights with knives and cutting in faces, which I never heard of in the past, I ask myself, what happened to The Friendly Island? What will my legacy be? I made it by not educating my people.
Does what happened with the traffic on Wednesday on the Cole Bay Hill remind us that we have too many cars on the roads and that part of the solution is to regulate public transportation in order to minimize this?
Russell A. Simmons
