Over six million Venezuelan nationals have left their homeland and sought refuge abroad (UN International Organisation for Migration). Even though Trinidad and Tobago is only a fraction of the size of Venezuela, we are still one of its closest neighbours, and every year, a significant number arrive on these shores in the hope of making a better life for themselves and their families.
“What I would like people to understand about the migrants,” says Natalie Bhawanie, a tutor at the Centre for Language Learning, “is that these people have been put into an extremely difficult situation and were forced to uproot their lives and move here. They didn't just wake up one day and decide to leave everything behind and move to Trinidad for no reason. You hear a lot of negative comments about the migrants, about how they are coming here to take away jobs from locals and other such narratives, but I think we could all afford to be more tolerant and understanding of their situation and strive to show more empathy towards them.”
The migrants face many challenges when arriving in T&T, and in addition to the resistance with which they are sometimes met, they also face the challenge of having to learn a new language.
“The migrants already have enough on their plate,” adds Bhawanie, “so at the CLL, we thought about how we could try to help them with their language needs.”
We started off by covering all aspects of the language that was necessary for daily life here in T&T. We focused on things like going to the bank, getting medicine at the pharmacy, and even how to order doubles!
This assistance was given through a beginner level English language programme funded by the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), with the support of the Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration (PRM) of the US Department of State, and delivered by The UWI's Centre for Language Learning earlier this year. Bhawanie, alongside another CLL tutor, Christobel Maynard, delivered the pilot course over a period of six months.
The instructors at The UWI noted that many of the migrants were already qualified to perform a variety of jobs in various sectors. A sound knowledge of English is often a key factor in whether or not the migrants are able to find good jobs and determined their ability to integrate into the society and economy. However, the language barrier prevents many from getting the jobs for which they were qualified. To remedy this, the course offered by CLL strove to give migrants a solid basis for their language learning needs.
“We started off by covering all aspects of the language that was necessary for daily life here in T&T. We focused on things like going to the bank, getting medicine at the pharmacy, and even how to order doubles! The hope is that they would be better equipped to communicate in an English-speaking environment.”
The course received a very favourable response from the students.
“We really would like to thank God for putting these wonderful teachers in our path,” says Rómulo José Moya, one of the students of the English language programme, “and we would really like to thank the university and all the members of this team who helped us with our English training. We really appreciate the blessing of having knowledgeable teachers with such a high level of commitment who always offered us words of support.”
Bhawanie's hope is that more courses like this will become available that are geared to the specific needs of the migrants.
“I really wish that we can get more funding to do more projects like this, because it's never enough. This is just one way for us to help,” she says. “Hopefully, we would be able to do more work like this in the future.”
