KEVON FELMINE

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

“You are tak­ing care of your neigh­bour’s chil­dren be­cause they ran across here, but you have locked out yours.”

This was how moth­er Claudette Davis de­scribed the gov­ern­ment’s de­ci­sion to bar en­try to her daugh­ter and 13 oth­er T&T cit­i­zens aboard a Nor­we­gian Cruise Line (NCL) Hold­ings ves­sel head­ing for this coun­try. Davis said the gov­ern­ment is now hous­ing, feed­ing and car­ing for 32 Venezue­lans who the coast guard res­cued from a sink­ing ves­sel that il­le­gal­ly en­tered lo­cal wa­ters.

The 14 are among Caribbean, Cen­tral and South Amer­i­can na­tion­als who are em­ploy­ees of NCL Hold­ings.

In April, NCL be­gan trans­port­ing em­ploy­ees from var­i­ous ves­sels to the MS Ma­ri­na, a cruise ship op­er­at­ed by its sub­sidiary com­pa­ny Ocea­nia Cruis­es.

It docked in Mi­a­mi, USA af­ter its pas­sen­gers dis­em­barked on March 23 as COVID-19 shut down the cruise ship in­dus­try.

Davis told Guardian Me­dia that she wrote Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Stu­art Young weeks ago as there was a char­tered plane that could have brought her daugh­ter and 168 cit­i­zens to T&T. How­ev­er, with no per­mis­sion giv­en for the plane’s en­try, her daugh­ter re­mained at sea. Af­ter read­ing the T&T Guardian on Wednes­day, in which Young said no ex­emp­tions would be grant­ed for cruise ship em­ploy­ees, she called a Min­istry of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty of­fi­cial and left a voice note but there was no re­sponse. 

“The gov­ern­ment is like a good moth­er as the State did very well in han­dling COVID-19. But they need to stop be­ing afraid be­cause I feel it is un­fair. They can­not throw away and treat their chil­dren like that. No mat­ter what, you take care of your chil­dren. Those em­ploy­ees are T&T’s chil­dren,” Davis said.

The MS Ma­ri­na is sched­uled to leave Flori­da, Mi­a­mi on Sat­ur­day be­fore ar­riv­ing in Port-of-Spain on June 11.