If Bar­ba­dos is Lit­tle Eng­land, then there’s no doubt in my mind that Trinidad is Lit­tle Amer­i­ca. iPhones, Star­bucks and KFC dom­i­nate while the youth fre­quent malls in their down­time just to sit around and chill. Now, whether or not this is a pos­i­tive state of af­fairs isn’t the top­ic du jour. Rather, I want to talk about one as­pect of Amer­i­can cul­ture which we im­port­ed and its im­pact on the blind and vi­su­al­ly im­paired (BVI) com­mu­ni­ty. I re­fer, of course, to the Tri­ni dream, which is our take on the Amer­i­can one.

It’s in­struc­tive to de­fine what, ex­act­ly, the Tri­ni dream is be­fore we pro­ceed. The Tri­ni dream is the promise that every work­ing-class Trinida­di­an par­ent in­cul­cates in their chil­dren to en­sure they have a bet­ter life than they did. In essence, it posits that one should pass for a pres­tige school, go to uni­ver­si­ty, and then get a good pay­ing job, thus en­abling them to get mar­ried, buy a pala­tial house in sub­ur­bia with fort­like con­crete walls adorned by fan­cy land­scap­ing like re­gal dress­es, while five dogs of mixed breed­ing, none of which are fit for Trinidad’s cli­mate, run around their Ford Ranger. And, don’t for­get the clas­sic Sun­day lunch and reg­u­lar trips to New York and Mi­a­mi.

Nat­u­ral­ly, as an am­bi­tious young man, I yearn to be one who winds up with a husky or two, but the sim­ple re­al­i­ty is even if I keep up my cur­rent tra­jec­to­ry, go to uni­ver­si­ty and get a big wuck, that dream may not be avail­able to me as a blind per­son.