DIANA MAHABIR-WYATT
Born to Give

I am looking for an angel Mahabir-Wyatt says, as her assistant pats me with a paper towel. I’d just entered her St. Clair office, from the rain, and had gotten slightly damp. “Somehow,” she continued, “someone always calls and volunteers though.” The job was to escort a little boy to rehabilitation twice per week. I made a mental note to throw the proposition out to our Facebook fans, and hopefully recruit some volunteers.

I told Mahabir-Wyatt how much I admired her work as Director of the Coalition Against Domestic Violence, and in the promotion of human rights generally, and asked whether she felt that philanthropic or self-sacrificial persons are made or born.

She is quick to negate any credit to herself. “My personal opinion is that it’s just in your DNA,” she says. “My mother was always the person people came to when they were in trouble. Some of my school friends have said to me that she was the one who helped them when their family did not. My father was a doctor who also did whatever he could to help people, often on credit.”

“Many years after my father had passed,” she continued, not satisfied that she had answered my question, “his younger brother, my uncle, came to Trinidad. He related that when they were children, they lived in a town in Ontario, with a railway passing through, which was close to the U.S. border. He’d noticed that every weekend his mother would be cooking big pots of stew, and people would be sitting in their verandah, which ran around their house, partaking of meals. He went downstairs and found chalk marks leading from the house all the way to the railway station. This was during the depression. And so homeless people would hop off that railway station and follow the chalk marks to my grandmother’s to find food.

My uncle confessed that he wanted to brush off the marks, but his father said, ‘Don’t you dare. Leave them exactly the way they are. Those people have nothing to eat.’ He was most annoyed with his father. He reasoned that he never had new clothes or shoes, but on weekends his father would go into the country and pick up kids with no shoes, and buy shoes for them. I thought, my God. He was nurtured to help people the way I had been, but he had quite a different outlook.”

Mahabir-Wyatt truly believes that she was born to do the work she does: “You do the things you do because you can’t stop yourself. It’s no real credit to you; it’s in the bones. For instance, some people are born to write, paint or play music. You can’t stop a jazz musician from playing jazz; you’d have to bind his hands.”

Albeit, she has been a champion for many, there were times when she too needed a hero, and help was never far away. She ponders that she was just passing on help that she had received from others.

She was a divorcee, with four children in tow, by age twenty-six; and had returned to Montreal to finish her university degree. She had tonnes of responsibility, financial and otherwise; but didn’t have much money to support her family; they often lived from month to month. She says: “I remember once someone helped me. It was a few months before my exams, and I’d run out of money. I didn’t know what I was going to do. Then one day someone rang the doorbell and I found three bags of groceries on the doorstep. There was everything we needed, pampers and milk for the children and so on. That saved me.

Later I’d found out who had done it. It was a friend of a friend; she didn’t even know me. I asked, ‘How can I ever thank you?’ She said, ‘Just pass on the favour’. So now whenever any woman asks me for anything, I never say ‘no’. I always do what I can; and if I can’t help, I find someone who could. I really think that women need to help women, because who else is going to?”

Is someone interested in the welfare of women and of all people a feminist? A humanitarian? Or both? This is no quandary for Mahabir-Wyatt. Women’s rights equal human rights.

Mahabir-Wyatt is a national champion for human rights. As an independent senator, and member of the Trinidad and Tobago Senate, for twelve years, she has vigorously pursued changes to legislation governing children, industrial relations and equal opportunities for women and minorities, including amendments to the Domestic Violence Act, the Sexual Offences Act and the Cohabitation Act. as it turns out, she was set on this path from a tender age. “I was a feminist by age five,” she says. “And very conscious of it.” How does a five year old become conscious of that?

She explains: “My father had five brothers, who all wanted sons. In fact, it was a competition to see who would have the first. My mom had two girls by cesarean, and was advised not to have any more kids. But my father desperately wanted a boy, so my mother risked her life to have another child, who turned out to be me; so that was a big disappointment for them. Then came my spoilt little brother who usurped my position as then empress of the universe. I was made to understand that boys were much more valuable than girls.”

Mahabir-Wyatt confesses that she was a “little terror” as a girl. But you don’t feel that “girl done wrong” vibration in her company. Au contraire, you’re lulled into believing that she must have been an angel her whole life. Her voice is calm and gentle. Her eyes are kind.

Then, she tells the tale of the uncle and the onion, and the most curious girl-like and sassy tone emerges, as if she has gone back to those days. She says: “When my uncle came home from World War 2 (I was about six years old) he brought my spoilt little brother back a lovely, elaborately carved dagger with an ivory hilt, and bronze scabbard, as well as a parachute. He brought me back two little wooden shoes marked Holland. They were so tiny. He said to “I was made to understand that boys were much more valuable than girls.” use them for my dolls. I was furious, and thought I’d teach him a lesson.

I knew he hated onions. So I waited till he was stretched out on a chaise and I went up to him, and in my sweetest little girl voice I said, ‘Open your mouth and close your eyes, and see what comes as a big surprise’. So he opened his mouth and I shoved the onion in and ran. Mind you, this onion was freshly picked, with the dirt still on it.”

Other grown ups teased her constantly. “My teachers would trouble me all the time,” she says. “They’d say, you can’t do that, only boys can do that.” Her eyes burned with recollection. “And I’d be so furious. I’d want to show them.”

This home grown defiance, coupled with her compassion for other women, and an inherent will to help, prompted Mahabir-Wyatt to form the Coalition Against Domestic Violence. In the early days, she’d spend hours each day working on the battered women’s shelter. She says, “It’s the impatience that I have to take things and make them right.”

She remembers a series of violent incidents she’d read about in the newspaper, some too morbid to reprint here, and other experiences, which gave way to this super human effort.

She and her husband had gone to a friend’s house for a “lime”. On the same street in which the friend lived, was an eerie house, where a woman’s husband killed her. The hostess of the party related that the victim’s husband would often come home drunk and beat the woman. The hostess’s husband indicated that he could not handle the victim’s screaming when the beatings took place, and would go into his room, and shut the door, hoping that the woman would shut up.

Mahabir-Wyatt saw that people had become too apathetic; they would not help those who were screaming out for help. Domestic abuse was tolerated. Accepted. It was expected that a woman would be shown her place in a marriage or household. She was condemned a tattletale if she reported abuses, and sent back to her husband by some police officers.

She applied for a house from the Government, that she could use as a shelter. She got the approval on a Monday, and by Thursday, Servol (of which she was a Director) had already sent her a woman, and two children, in need of help. The woman brought no belongings, besides book bags and toothbrushes. Her tale was a gory and heart wrenching one; her husband would beat her, then rape her, each day, and he’d wake the kids to see.

That family was the first to spend the night at the shelter; and at the time the house comprised only a mattress, and kerosene lamp. Mahabir-Wyatt notes that the woman must have been scared, but staying there was better than the alternative. Within a month over ten people had sought shelter.

She says: “But I had help. A lot of help. I would be thinking that we needed this or that, and the phone would ring; problem solved. God was sending things my way. I would ask God, ‘Really? Can’t you let me do anything on my own?’”

Thirty years later, the shelter is still up and running; the need for it has not disappeared. Mahabir-Wyatt speaks of the victims with much compassion, and without judgement. I ask her: Why do women stay in abusive relationships? She says: Because they have more courage than everybody else.

“Oftentimes, they were married young, and did not have job experience or a solid educational background. They have children to take care of. I know women who have precipitated a beating. They would send their kids to school, then nag their husbands till the beating started, after which they would have enough time to patch up, before the kids returned home.

Sometimes they stayed because they were in love, and they kept hoping that their husband would change, and love them again. There is also learned helplessness. You see it with children who are abused. It’s a dependency syndrome, or psychological paralysis.”

In recognition of her efforts in human rights, Mahabir-Wyatt was awarded the Gold Medal for the Development of Women. “Finally,” she says, “they (the Government) have recognized women’s rights as human rights. This means that we can start pushing for other things.”

She notes that women still earn considerably less than men in the region—only sixty-two percent of what men earn for the same jobs—and that the wages and compensation structure was built on the assumption that men are the breadwinners; but in a lot of cases the women are the sole breadwinners. She laments that there are more and more single moms out there; and the system still isn’t fair. Mahabir-Wyatt’s desk rests near an open window, looking unto a St. Clair street. One can imagine her gazing out at the trees, the orchids, the hibiscuses, all day; that is, if one wasn’t aware of how much she needed to get done.

But before I get to the how, I ask why. Why did she choose to make Trinidad her home?

“They say that a man’s home is where he was born, and a woman’s home is where her children were born,” she says. “All my children were born here. I have one child who migrated, but his children have come back.”

Her next reason, considering that she has affected change in each capacity she has held, really sums things up. She says: “I feel you can contribute more in a developing country. You take care of yourself and others, instead of being taken care of from cradle to grave, as you are in more developed nations. But you have to work and take responsibility and build up your own life. You can grow things here. Achieve things. You fight and keep on trying. You do what you have to do.”

She admits that it’s Carnival that made her fall in love: “I went to my first ole mas at the oval. When the jump-up started I was amazed. There was this mass of people jumping up in the air; it was madness. We were living in those flats by the savannah then. And at quarter to five I heard the j’ouvert band coming down and I was literally hanging out my window. I wanted nothing better than to go out and join them. If I didn’t have a baby to care for then, I would have!”