In my sojourns, I came across someone who had worked with Social Services in Siparia, Trinidad and Tobago, and took the opportunity to hear some of their experiences. In my world, I connect with people of all types in society, and there is much to be learned from that.

He tells me an old woman made him cry. It’s a very human story, where the children abandoned the mother, but the meat for this post is in the beginning of the story, where he lays the context:

“Every year pensioners have to come in and sign a document to show that they’re not dead.”, he said.

I looked at him, appreciating what he said and how he said it – how silly it is. I smiled.

“No, really, that’s the only reason that these people have to come in. To show that they’re not dead.”

I got it the first time, which he wasn’t used to, but here’s why that is something I had to smile at and why he felt he needed to repeat himself: Within the last decade, births and deaths – it’s buried in some Ministry somewhere, I don’t really care which – became computerized, and they’ve been busy updating birth certificates to the point where the populace is a bit tired of having to go get an updated document from Births and Deaths.

So that information exists in computer readable form in one tendril of the vast bureaucracy. Yet, somehow, it is not connected to the pensioner’s information. Now, people do have to go in and sign because others had been collecting pensions for the dead, so now someone has to wander in and prove that they are still alive. “I’m here! I’m breathing! Here’s my signature!”

But the data could be connected. It could allow the pensioners to stay home, and if there are questions, why not go to them? Having recently dealt with the death of someone close to me who was a pensioner and having seen what her son went through, it seems peculiar that we need to torture the old and the weak to prove that they still get a payment deposited to their account. There are so many ways to deal with that.

It’s these little things that technology, properly done, could help with. It’s these little things that technology doesn’t in Trinidad and Tobago.

Maybe privatization is the way to go to make things more human, but then with corruption and poor analyses of what actually exists, who is to say that it would get done? Therein lies the rub.

Given the opportunity, I’m sure that people could fix that. I’m sure I’m not alone in wanting to see silly little things like that fixed. Pensioners are already on the downhill slope, why subject them to a gauntlet of 1,000 papercuts?