Hunger striker Dr Wayne Kublalsingh was too weak to talk yesterday and asked his wife Dr Sylvia Moodie-Kublalsingh to answer his cellphone. “He is speaking with difficulty. He does not have much energy to talk. He’s sinking more and more. He’s just bones now,” Moodie-Kublalsingh told the T&T Guardian. It has been 57 days now since Kublalsingh embarked on a second hunger strike, allegedly without food and water.
Told some people found this amazing, Moodie-Kublalsingh replied: “I too. I don’t know what to say.” She said Kublalsingh spent most of his time in bed at their home in D’Abadie. “He gets up and tries to sit a little,” she added. Even as Kublalsingh’s health waned, members of the lobby group, Project 40, yesterday met with President Anthony Carmona to ask for mediation over the issue of the Debe to Mon Desir segment of the extension of the Solomon Hochoy to Point Fortin, the reason for Kublalsingh’s hunger strike.
Kublalsingh and the Highway Re-route Movement (HRM) he leads want that segment of the highway stopped. They are claiming it will have disastrous ecological and social consequences.
Other civil society groups, trade unions, religious bodies and an environmental organisation have since supported his cause. Asked if her husband hoped Project 40’s meeting with Carmona, Moodie-Kublalsingh said she did not know. “I haven’t chatted with him about it,” she said, adding she did not talk to him more than necessary to conserve his energy. Moodie-Kublalsingh was certain, however, that “he definitely wants mediation... from the beginning, he wanted it to end.”
Asked how she was coping with his deteriorating health, she said it was exceedingly hard. They have been married for 28 years and have a 22-year-old son, Ori, a student at the Hugh Wooding Law School. “I have to try to detach myself and not be emotional. I do not look at him too much,” she added. A staunch Roman Catholic, she said prayers, private tutoring jobs and the support of people who visited her have been helping. She said last Saturday a group of 30 young people from her church sang and prayed with lit candles in front of their house. “Priests and ministers came and prayed,” she added.
Asked how their son coped, she said he was focused on his law studies. Moodie-Kublalsingh said she supported her husband’s cause but did not support hunger strikes, not even Gandhi’s, and had made that clear to him. “It’s not logical to do what he’s doing. Our bodies are God-given. They have been given to us to respect not to be used as a political protest tool. I don’t think that’s right,” she added.