A few months ago, returning home from Malawi, I overnighted in Johannesburg.  I told an Uber driver there that I had never seen anyone shot dead in the United States.  He stared at me.  I looked back at him and said emphatically that I had never seen anyone even threatened with a gun.  The driver shook his head in disbelief.

I get it.  It’s like my telling people that I’ve lived in Oklahoma for over 40 years and never seen a tornado.   

And so there’s a woman in Eastern Canada with whom I trade travel stories, and when she learned that I was planning a trip to Trinidad she told me to be very, very careful.  I didn’t ask why.  I knew that the State Department tells people to “reconsider travel” to Trinidad.  That’s their advisory level three, and there’s only one level that’s higher.  It amounts to “don’t go.”

Perhaps my friend had seen the map posted online by the Canadian government.  It  divides Trinidad into areas where visitors are advised to “exercise a high degree of caution” and other areas where visitors are told to “avoid non-essential travel.”  I have trouble with the distinction, but I get the drift.  And then, of course, there’s the government of Trinidad itself, which in 2025 declared a nationwide State of Emergency.  It was still in force when I spent two weeks on the island in April, 2026.

A few weeks later I reported back that I hadn’t had any problems.  Yes, a guard at the site of World War II’s Carlsen Field had told me I shouldn’t be here.  It wasn’t safe, she said, especially for an obvious foreigner.  I was looking around for the ruins of a huge steel barn that had housed blimps, or dirigibles, patrolling the Caribbean Sea for German subs, but the guard had never heard of it, and she said I was in danger.  Other people warned me specifically about this same area, and I decided not to be completely stupid.  I never found the ruins of the old hangar, if they exist, but in a few quick passes I did find plenty of concrete poured, I assume, by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers or possibly one of the Navy’s Construction Battalions.  It was the first time I’d ever seen a junkyard with city buses piled up to rust on the excellent paving of an American airfield. 

A couple of days later I was looking around the ruins of a huge, abandoned and now disintegrating sugar refinery, and a guard insisted on keeping an eye on my rented car.  I didn’t think it was necessary, but he said car theft was a problem. Worse things could happen, too.  I asked who the bad guys were.  The guard blamed a jobs program that had been shut down, tossing thousands of young men onto the streets.  Somebody else agreed that the loss of that program had contributed to the problem, but he said that the root cause was Trinidad’s position as a way-station for drugs heading to Europe.  Drug bosses didn’t waste their time stealing cars, but underemployed youngsters topped-up their income with easy pickings like me.

The only thing I know for sure is that in these two weeks I saw hundreds of people, a few loafing on street corners but everyone else busy living their lives.  I think of one woman working next to a huge stack of coconuts.  For 45 Trinidad and Tobago dollars, about six U.S. dollars, she would pick up a machete, reach over to the pile, choose a coconut, whack off its top, and pour the water through a big funnel into a two-liter plastic bottle.  A dozen or so coconuts later, she screwed a lid tightly on the bottle and handed it over.  I told her that for all the coconut water I had drunk in India, I had never seen the stuff bottled this way.  She worked seven days a week, and I bet she misses me now that I’m gone.  I miss her.  Canned coconut water isn’t the same.   

I was renting a small house at a place called Endeavour, which is about 15 miles southeast of Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital.  Endeavour is not to be confused with neighboring Enterprise or nearby Perseverance.  Felicity is a few miles away.  These are all the names of 19th century sugarcane estates. They and scores of others gradually consolidated into a few properties and then into a single operation owned by the British giant, Tate and Lyle.

The government of Trinidad took over in 1975.  Production slowed, and stopped dead in 2003.  It’s tempting to blame nationalization, but without tariff protection Trinidad couldn’t compete with the likes of Brazil, and that protection ended when the UK joined a predecessor of the European Union.  The guards at the refinery were under orders to go inside when the wind blew hard.  That way, they’d be less likely to be hit with flying debris.  The good news was that the adjoining golf course was still in good shape and heavily used.  I saw the greens, along with the bungalows where British managers had lived, not in grandeur but in spacious comfort.  

Nobody in Trinidad today grows sugarcane, but my house was at the end of a short, dead-end road, beyond which a few acres of surviving cane grew like weeds.  The far side of the field was fringed with monkeypod trees, also called rain trees and saman trees from the botanical name, Samanea saman.   These trees are huge, with arms two feet thick and a canopy that forms a semicircular disc against the sky.  The older trees drip with parasites that make the trees doubly venerable, like whales crusted with barnacles. 

On my side of the field there were a couple of mango and pomegranate trees, which makes me wonder if Endeavour’s “big house”–the estate owner’s house–had been nearby.  Very few big houses survive, and I found only one open to visitors and in good shape.  It belonged to the former Spring Hill estate, once a coffee and cocoa plantation in the mountains east of Port of Spain.  Coffee is no longer grown commercially in Trinidad, and cocoa production has fallen over the last century from 30,000 tons annually to about 400 tons, but Spring Hill has survived by becoming the Asa Wright Nature Center, famous for bird-watching.  To my disgust, in 2022 it became a luxury retreat, charging $83 for a day pass and a lot more for visitors wanting to stay overnight.    A remote-controlled gate at the start of the long access road would not open until I coughed up a credit-card number.

I wouldn’t make a federal case about this except that this place was such a rare glimpse into a vanished world.  The main room of the big house, very comfortably furnished, measured at least 20 feet by 30, and it opened on one of its long sides onto a partially covered and equally large balcony overlooking heavily forested mountains.  Indoors and outdoors merged, and the site was high enough that it was comfortable without air conditioning.  

The trouble is that at these prices the people enjoying the place were mostly half-dead old white foreigners.  You’d think that the government would have tried to restore at least some of these old big houses, but the effort has been minimal.  I think of the Big House at Woodford Lodge, one of the cane estates that lasted longest.  It had been reduced to a clubhouse by the 1990s, but when I came upon it—accidentally because there are no guides to these things–-I found a grand staircase supported on arches but leading nowhere, plus some brick piers that had once supported a building where now there was only encroaching forest. 

My house–I’d better emphasize that I was in it for only two weeks–was one of tens of thousands built by the government of Trinidad in a remarkable program that had started shortly after independence from Britain in 1962.  (I was an undergrad that year, and John F. Kennedy was in the White House.)  The United States had  FHA-insured mortgages and slum-clearance programs, but newly independent Trinidad jumped into housing programs with both feet and began building dozens of government-planned communities, neatly laid out with parks, curved streets, and underground utilities.  

Over the years, government contractors have built and sold about 50,000 homes in these projects. You can complain that 50,000 isn’t much in a country with 400,000 households, but I think it’s a remarkable achievement.  The homes mostly have two bedrooms and two baths and are built to a standard plan of about 1,500 square feet with a rectangular footprint under a gently pitched gable.  It sounds a bit like postwar suburbia in the United States, which Americans love to mock, but the people in these Trinidad homes take very good care of them.  That may be because many buyers previously lived in unpainted wood shacks open to clouds of mosquitoes.  There are lots of those homes still on the island, but all the homes around me were air tight and air-conditioned.  Electricity in Trinidad, by the way, costs about six cents a kilowatt-hour.  That’s about a third of the average in the United States.  Trinidad is lucky to have lots of offshore natural gas.

My home belonged to a young couple with a two-year-old boy.  They had family members in Alberta and Arizona, and they had visited the States often enough to understand why I moaned about international transiting at the Miami airport.  The wife worked in Port of Spain, I believe in a social-welfare department.  To get to work, she drove about 15 miles mostly on a six-lane highway begun by the U.S. Army during World War II and completed in the 1950s.  She said she had to leave the house by five in the morning if she wanted to avoid traffic.  Any later and what ought to have been a twenty minute drive became an hour or more.  

Well, you may say, this is good news.  These are the kinds of problems that people in poor countries would love to have.  You’re probably right.  Trinidad has about one motor vehicle for every two people, which is not quite as many as the United States but doesn’t fall mortifyingly short.  Trinidad has shopping malls, too, and they’re busy.  I could easily find my favorite brand of American cottage cheese along with my favorite Scandinavian crispbread.  Apart from traffic congestion, I could live a life here that was materially very close to what I have at home.

Still, if someone asked me to name the most beautiful thing I saw in Trinidad, I’d say not the mountains or the sea but the Mud House Museum.  It’s about a twenty-mile and twenty-minute drive south along the four-lane highway to San Fernando, followed by a ten mile and forty-minute drive on the narrow and twisty Old Siparia Road.   Apart from about 80 miles of multi-lane highway, Trinidad’s roads are old, narrow, and without shoulders.  When people park to make a delivery or pick somebody up, they inevitably block half the road.  Drivers take turns navigating around the stopped vehicle.  It’s no fun, but the island has about 3,000 miles of paved road, and they aren’t going to be rebuilt anytime soon.

When I got to the museum I saw a four-sided pyramid of rusty sheetmetal.  Then I noticed that it was actually two stacked pyramids, with a ventilation gap between them. When I got out of the car, I saw that the metal roof was only an umbrella sheltering and completely detached from a mud-colored block about 25-feet square and perhaps eight feet high.  I thought at first that the umbrella was a protective afterthought, courtesy of the museum, but it was original equipment, built with the rest of the house in 1885.  On some of the metal sheets I could even see the stamped name of the manufacturer, Morewood and Company, London & Birmingham.  That company went out of business in about 1900.

The mud house under its umbrella had been formed of unburned bricks dug at a spot that was now a pond, perhaps 50 feet away.  Once stacked, the bricks had been plastered with more mud to form smooth walls inside and out.   It had never been painted.  There was only one door, and there were no windows.  Inside, a ladder led to a flat wooden roof.  Children had slept up there, protected by the metal umbrella whose peak was about 20 feet above them.  Adults slept inside the house.  The interior of the house was too dark for anyone to do much work, so whatever needed doing was done in daylight on one of the four porches, all about 10 feet wide, that encircled the mud house and which the umbrella completely sheltered from both rain and sun.

I had seen such houses, minus the umbrella, in Bangladesh.  The erudite but cantankerous Nirad Chaudhuri once wrote about how such houses until about 1900 were roofed with straw but since then had been increasingly roofed with sheet metal laid directly on the house.  He says nothing about this Trinidad variant, and I’m reasonably sure he had no idea who introduced it.  Neither do I.  Apparently there had been many of these mud houses sheltering under their metal pyramids, but this was the lone survivor.

Chaudhuri wrote that homeowners were meticulous about applying a fresh coat of mud annually.   Come to think of it, I’ve seen people doing just that at Shibam, until recently a major tourist attraction in southern Yemen.  If they don’t do it, the mud plaster begins to crack.  That was happening here, too, despite the umbrella.  Apparently humidity alone is enough in a humid climate like Trinidad’s to make the outside wall of the house flake until it looks like a pangolin defensively raising its scales.

The woman showing me the house apologized for the flakes.  She had grown up here, along with seven sisters and one brother.  It still belonged to her family, who earned a pittance from admissions but cared for the house as a labor of love.  Still, there was nobody at hand to apply a fresh coat of mud. 

I think of the contrast with my Endeavour house, built not with a wood frame, as in most American houses, but with hollow clay blocks.  You couldn’t see them under the plaster and paint, but they measured 4 inches by 8 by 12 and were divided into three identical cells.  They retailed for about one U.S. dollar each and were normally sold on pallets with 312 blocks.  Builders needed concrete for posts, but that was available, too.   So were concrete boom-pumps that could deliver concrete through a long mechanical arm to wherever you wanted it on a building site.  Trim was available as well.  I visited one small shop that took concrete tubes about 10 inches in diameter and transformed it into classical columns.  They weren’t fluted, but you could add Corinthian capitals of cast cement, and you could order a paint job that made the columns look something like marble.  

I suppose that the mud house seemed like an ugly duckling.  I myself certainly wouldn’t want to live in it: no electricity, no plumbing, hardly any light, hotter than hell even at night.  Yet no homeowner will ever feel about a modern home the way a homeowner feels about a house that he has not only built himself but built from materials he has made himself.  It’s not rocket science.  My wife’s spaghetti sauce tastes better than anything from a store.  The problem is that she actually makes spaghetti sauce, and I’ve never made a house.

The woman showing me the mud house seemed to agree with me when I said that I thought the place was beautiful, but she was the grandchild of indentured laborers brought from India after the British abolished slavery in 1834.   I asked her whether as a child she had helped work on the surrounding cocoa plantation, and she fired back that her mother would not let her touch a cocoa pod.  Her mother had been determined that her girls would get an education, and, though her son had gone on to a career in the oil fields, all the girls graduated from college.  The woman telling me this had recently retired after 50 years as a high-school science teacher.  She complained that the curriculum was being watered down.

I think she saw the house less as a thing of beauty than as a treasured marker of her family’s journey.  Her grandparents, she knew all too well, would have been dismissively addressed as “coolies,” a word that I think of as Trinidad’s C-word.  I asked her what she thought of V.S. Naipaul, himself the descendent of indentured Indians living a few miles from my house in Endeavour.  He had left the island at 17, and he later wrote the island was worthless and its people were useless.  The woman at the Mud House Museum was proud, and I expected her to respond angrily to the name Naipaul, but she said she admired him, not because he judged the island and its people so harshly and not because he had won a Nobel prize  but because his spectacularly articulate contempt for the island and its people revealed the everlasting humiliation that both he and she remembered.  He expressed the pain of that humiliation better than anyone else on the planet.  

Between 1845 and 1917, some 145,000 Indians arrived on Trinidad after stops in South Africa and at St. Helena.  They faced five years of indentured labor.  In theory they were given half of their passage cost back to India after ten years, but it seems that very few were given or chose to exercise that right.  Meanwhile, they had to accept the fact that the colonial government prohibited cremation.  I suppose this might be analogous to Americans learning that at their death their bodies would be tossed on the street for packs of dogs.  Cremation was prohibited for almost a hundred years but was finally legalized in 1936.  Indians who had never seen a cremation restored the practice, and by accident I came upon two cremation grounds. On one of them I saw a body in the midst of a flaming pyre by the sea.  There must have been a hundred people watching.  They had come by private cars, and they were all dressed in Western clothes except for the couple standing nearest to the flames.  They wore white kurtas and pajama bottoms.

Meanwhile, along with being forced to bury their dead, Trinidad’s Indians attracted missionaries, and today about forty percent of Trinidad’s Indians–say 200,000 out of half a million–are Christian, mostly Evangelicals, Roman Catholics, or Presbyterians.  The Presbyterians in particular trace their history to John Morton, a Canadian who arrived in 1868 as an evangelist but also as a social-welfare reformer, determined to help Indians become literate in English.  He set them on the path to professional careers, and it’s hard to fault him for this, but one consequence of these conversions is that a large fraction of Trinidad’s Indians now eat beef.  Not the Indians who are still Hindu but many of those who are Christian.  The woman who showed me around the Mud House Museum was a widow and a practicing Hindu, but her husband, also Indian, had been a Christian.  So were their children.   I sensed some pain and also some acceptance.

All the more reason to hang on to the Mud House, and all the more reason to preserve the island’s very few old Hindu temples. 

Indentured workers, usually confined to barracks, had not been allowed to build temples, so the first were built by Indians who had completed their indentureship.   That might have been as early as 1850, but so far as I know, the earliest visitor to comment on Trinidad’s temples was Charles Kingsley, author of a famous children’s book you may recall, The Water-Babies.  Kingsley is remembered as a social reformer, as a believer in bettering the conditions of working men, and as a supporter of Charles Darwin.  Yet here he is writing in 1871 of a dark hut with “three or four squatting abominations.”  I’m not sure what he’s talking about, but he goes on to say that “the Coolie temples are curious places to those who have never before been face to face with real heathendom.” He laments the existence of “heathen idol chapels, in the midst of a Christian and civilized land.” 

Fifteen  years later, in 1887, Lafcadio Hearn visited as a correspondent for Harpers.   Unlike Kingsley, Hearn actually tells us something about what the temple he visited looked like.  He writes that his carriage halted “before a shed … a simple roof of palm thatch supported upon jointed posts of bamboo.  It is a little coolie temple.  A few weary Indian labourers slumber in its shadow… Painted over the wall surface, in red,  yellow, brown, blue, and green designs upon a white ground, are extraordinary figures of gods and goddesses.    They are all very naive–remind one of the first efforts of a child with the first box of paints.”  

The temples Kingsley and Hearn saw no longer exist, but a couple of old temples do survive, and the one I visited is a treasure.  It’s called the Moose Bhagat temple.  It’s named for the man who built it in 1904, and it’s still owned by his descendants.  It’s 13 miles east of San Fernando in a settlement called Tableland.  If you drive fast, maybe you can do those 13 miles in about 45 minutes. 

Moose Bhagat’s temple was not built to impress anyone.  From the street, looking straight on, I saw corrugated sheet metal covering a courtyard and protecting, at the center, a building that measured perhaps twelve feet square but which had a cupola rising through and above the metal, as if the metal was a wide skirt.  The cupola had windows on all sides and was topped with a pyramid, but the whole thing couldn’t have been more than 30 feet high.  I parked next to a front loader on the adjacent vacant lot and walked past a dozen red pennants on tall posts.  (Such pennants in Trinidad’s front yards are a diagnostic indicator of a practicing Hindu family.)  

The front of the Moose Bhagat temple was fenced with pickets, decoratively turned on a lathe and painted white.  To the left there was a ruined  house, I presume once occupied by Moose Bhagat or his children.   I feared the central gate would be locked, but it wasn’t, and there, on the base of the tower, against a white background, were paintings like the ones Hearn had seen in the 1880s.  I recognized Shiva, Lakshmi, Hanuman, and Ganesh.  There was another figure I didn’t recognize.  They were all dressed mostly in green, but Shiva was blue and almost naked.  He sat cross-legged on a golden cushion at the center of the group.  

As Hearn had written, the paintings were primitive, but paintings by 5-year-olds are not only primitive but sometimes beautiful, because they reveal a purity or innocence uncontaminated by the stuff of adult lives.   That’s why I put this temple up there with the Mud House Museum. 

The whole place was deserted yet wide open.  That included the shrine itself, with an altar loaded with what I suppose some would call trinkets: an array of figurines, paintings, and necklaces covering the central altar of white tile.  Out back, there was a kitchen equipped with a dozen empty and overturned bronze pots, deep enough to hold a gallon or two of whatever was cooking but curved at the bottom, like a wok.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen pots like that, and I don’t know where they come from or how they were made, but I would have bought one if they had been for sale.  I should add that there is a second tower behind the first.  It was built later, lacks the cupola but compensates with a taller pyramid.  Both towers are in a photograph published in 1945 in a book titled, significantly,  Indian Centenary Review: One Hundred Years of Progress.  

Progress is great, but if you ask people in Trinidad about the island’s most important Hindu temples they won’t mention Moose Bhagat’s.  Instead, they will tell you to visit the Dattatreya Mandir, a temple built in 2001.  That’s because the temple boasts an 85-foot-tall statue of Hanuman.  They will also say that you must visit the Temple in the Sea, built in 1947 at the end of a short breakwater because the temple builder had no onshore property.  It’s been improved, people say, which is fair warning that there’s almost nothing left of the original structure, which is now overwhelmed by a mass of garish ornaments heaped inside a building that might as well be a roadside pawnshop.  The 85-foot Hanuman might as well be an inflated dashboard ornament.

This tendency to replace the humble with the ostentatious, the honest with the tasteless, is hardly unique to Trinidad.  It occurs in every place I know of where a traditional society gets rich fast.  It then rushes to live the way it thinks all rich modern people live.  Cue Thorstein Veblen and his “conspicuous consumption.”  Close to my house in Endeavour, the Munroe Road Temple had in the 1990s been a barn: concrete floors, sheetmetal roof fully exposed both inside and out, a stage with a tiny Shiva lingam, and a scattering of folding metal chairs.  That was the “old temple,” I was told.  Now the floor was paved with tiles, the folding chairs had been replaced by heavy, cushioned chairs, the roof was hidden by swags of brightly colored cloth, and the tiny lingam was overpowered by a line of life-sized deities. The exterior of the building now hid its steel frame behind a facade of columns and arches and factory-made balustrades.  

A ceremony was underway when I came by.  Two boys were being introduced to the study of India’s sacred texts, and a proud audience of perhaps a hundred people watched the proceedings, which were amplified electronically to the point of pain, as though louder is better, just as bigger and brighter are better.

This was a rich temple with a rich community.  The people here carried themselves with the dignity that rests upon wealth and lasts until somebody of greater wealth shows up.  

I saw a poorer section of Trinidad’s Hindus at the Carlsen Field Mother Temple.  It was Sunday morning, and the temple–a simple shed topped with a six-foot swastika–was filled with several hundred people. They took turns, perhaps a hundred at a time, entering a central space where the temple’s owner–people called him Baba, as “father” or “guru”–yelled into a headset.  His voice, accompanied by live drumming, tested the temple’s loudspeakers.  The people in the central space writhed in ecstasy.  Those waiting their turn periodically stood in response to Baba’s orders and raised their arms in prayer.  

I took a couple of pictures and was aggressively hustled outside by a security guard who demanded to know how I would like it if somebody filmed me in my house.  I said I wasn’t in his house, which didn’t help.  He called the security chief, who told me to sit down.  In a few minutes Baba came over.  He was in his mid-fifties and powerfully built.  His head was shaven, and he was intense, fully charged.  He told me to come back Wednesday morning.  Meanwhile, he sat me down uncomfortably close to a loudspeaker.

I was sitting next to a man from Felicity, which has its own temples, and I saw him again on Wednesday, as he waited along with a couple of dozen other people. A sign said that anyone approaching Baba must have been fasting for three days.  This meant, specifically, “no meat, no fish, no eggs, no alcohol, no jhuta [whichis to say no dishonesty or lying], no sex, and no Chinese food.”  Also “no unclean ladies.”  People come forward singly or, if married, as couples.  Baba told them to stand and hold out their hands.  He looked briefly at their palms.  They then sat down and waited quietly while Baba wrote some instructions telling them what they should do.  They left a donation and went away, apparently satisfied.  The man from Felicity said that Baba had helped him with a problem in his life.  I couldn’t ask what it was, but he struck me as calm and sensible.

There was a break.  Baba left his spot and went over to the side.  I was told he would talk with me there.  I told Baba he was a busy man, and he replied that I could have two minutes.  We talked closer to five.  He said that reading palms was a gift.  He hadn’t trained for it, but he could see people’s lives in their hands.  Yes, the temple was his private property.  He had built it over twenty years or more.  He had children living in the United States and had visited many times, conducted services there, too.  I didn’t know what else to ask and was mostly aware that he was more forceful than I will ever be.

Across the street there was another temple, this one belonging to the Divine Life Society.  This was what had drawn me to this corner of Trinidad in the first place, because it sat next to the six-lane highway between Port of Spain and San Fernando and was dominated not by a six-foot swastika but by two concrete towers, one a pyramid pushing a hundred feet, the other a bit lower but with rounded corners.  

In some parts of the world the two structures might have been solid masonry, but here they were empty shells supported on steel frames.  I know this because I saw the girders through the windows of the building that enclosed the pyramids.  The building was locked tight and deserted both times I came by.  I conclude that the Divine Life Society, which states that its purpose is to “help adherents realize God and hence terminate this incessant cycle of birth and death,” was no match for Baba.

I had been ignoring Trinidad’s African population, and on the basis of nothing more than online reviews, I decided to visit the St. Ann’s Spiritual Baptist Church.  It was in the western suburbs of Port of Spain, but this was Sunday, and the highway was smooth sailing.  What I didn’t realize was that the church was on the slope of a very steep valley.  I don’t think the valley has a name, but the road running up the east side of it is Upper Bournes.  It’s one lane, with a natural wall on one side and a near-vertical drop on the other.  Despite the topography, both sides of the valley are thickly built up with two- or three-story houses, not according to a plan but wherever somebody has been able to secure a bit of land.  Cars were parked on the road wherever there was barely enough space for another car to pass.  I had to watch my side mirrors and keep an eye on the downhill side, which had no posts or guardrails.

Google said I had arrived, but I saw no church.  I stopped, parked, and immediately met an oncoming car whose driver told me I had parked in a spot that didn’t leave room for him.  It was time to jockey.  A few minutes later I found a better spot and began walking.   A few people were on the street, some chatting, one man washing his car.  They were all African.  An elderly Rastafarian came up and asked if I needed help.  On his head there was a two-tiered cloth bag holding what I assume was a prodigious mountain of hair.  He was prominently missing front teeth.  I told him I was looking for St. Ann’s.  He said he had lived here all his life–and I suppose he 60–but he said he was a Rasta and didn’t know the church.  I asked if I could take his picture.  He asked me why, and I said I didn’t know.  It turned out beautifully.  He’s smiling quietly, lips parted, no teeth showing.  His white beard is long enough to be felted and looks as soft as fleece.  I think his shirt has a Nike swoosh.

A woman on the street told me that to find the church I should go down the stairs that were beyond the next stairs.  She was right, and down a flight I saw a neat and new building, painted blue under a metal roof and with a balcony overlooking the axis of the valley.  The houses in view may have been arranged helter-skelter, but they were solidly build.  They had big plastic water tanks.  They had electricity.  I’m not sure if there were sewers, but the place didn’t stink, so one way or another people were careful.  It was quiet, but if somebody yelled, especially at night, many people would hear.

Outside the church there was a line of variously colored pennants, oddly reminiscent of the Hindu tradition.  They were a little the worse for wear, which is odd because the interior of the church was immaculate, though very plain except for the altar, which was a raised platform with curtains and candles and flowers and ornamental columns.  

Unfortunately for me, even though it was also 10 o’clock on Sunday morning, there was nobody around.  Services, I suspect, began at 11.  Rather than wait, I went back to the car.  I held up my phone as I drove back down Upper Bournes Road and made a little video.  One recipient replied, “Terrifying,” which surprised me because I’d always thought that she was pretty fearless.   Less than 10 minutes later I walked up a long flight of steps to the Mt. Hope Spiritual Baptist Church. I overtook two elderly women who were getting there a few steps at a time.  They were dressed in white dresses topped with blue turbans.  

Like St. Ann’s, Mt. Hope could have been a one-room masonry schoolhouse.  .  There was no balcony here, but a plaque said that the foundation stone had been laid in 1973 by Eric Williams, independent Trinidad’s celebrated first prime minister. 

A greeter offered a first bump and an up-front seat.  There were pews there and movable chairs at the back.  There were perhaps 20 people in the room, which was perhaps half full.  Perhaps three-quarters of the people were women, and they all were in long white dresses.  They wore turbans, too, most of them blue, but others orange and yellow.  The minister appeared.  He offered no sermon.  Instead, chanting began, with him saying a few words, and the congregation repeating them several times.  He clapped vigorously to keep things moving, and the woman clapped a bit more gently.  To my relief, there was no electronic amplification.  I was ignored, though one woman kindly offered to get me a bottle of water.  Did I want it room temperature or cold, she asked.  I asked for cold, and she brought a small bottle from a kitchen at the back.  

I left after about half an hour and have no idea how the proceedings evolved.  Go ahead and beat me up.  I never did get to the nearby no-go areas, either, which are chiefly the hilly, poor, and Black east side of Port of Spain.  On the highway into town I got a glimpse of some terrible slums there, as bad as anything in Lagos or Bombay.  I sent a few pictures home and somebody wrote back to say that she had just read that Trinidad was a high-income country.  I replied, “damned statistics.”  I don’t know how things would have gone if I had cruised through Laventille, the most notorious of these areas.  Perhaps I’d have seen or been involved in gunplay.  Perhaps I’d have seen tornadoes.  More likely, I would have seen nothing except very poor people in a very poor neighborhood.

People worry a lot.  They know what they’ve seen on the news.  One evening, at dusk, I walked around the neighborhood of my house and began taking pictures.  I hadn’t planned to do this, but I was struck by the fences that people had put up.  A few houses, including mine, sat naked on their lots, but most did not.  This wasn’t electric fencing or razorwire or–my favorite–masonry walls topped with cruel bits of broken beer bottles set point-up in a layer of mortar.  These fences certainly weren’t cheap, and they certainly weren’t improvised.  Usually they were metal, sometimes in geometric patterns, sometimes formed like vines and leaves.  Some fences were masonry, and none were wood.  Some protected a patch of grass, and others protected somebody’s effort to recreate the forest around the Asa Wright Nature Preserve.  I liked this variation in what I think we might call therapeutic fencing.