YOU WOULD normally expect any government to set a good example and lead the way by providing incentives geared at preserving or refurbishing historic buildings.

Based on the maturity of a people at various points in their country's development, they will either embrace or reject aspects of their history. Immature people will seek to destroy everything, which reminds them of slavery and/or a traumatic past.

It sounded comical hearing a senior government official say that the "slave hut" at or near Rock Hall, St Thomas (Freedom Village), was nearly destroyed by his department because it has a termite infested roof, and served as a breeding ground for rats. It must be recalled that that same department nearly destroyed a building of similar national significance at Speightstown, St Peter, a few months earlier.

Am I to believe that there were more rats in that slave hut or that the people of Rock Hall, St Thomas, were more at risk from rats coming from that slave hut than from any coming from the Mangrove Landfill or the sugar cane fields and gullies that surround that village?

Couldn't rat bait or a few cats have done the trick? Was it not reasonably foreseeable that a slave hut, which was built in the slave days, was reasonably likely to have termite-infested wood in 2008? You must excuse the people in the days of slavery if they did not have the benefit of pest control or chemicals to treat the lumber they used.

Everything seems to be crumbling!

Could we expect that the Environmental Engineer Department will knock down the old Welfare Department building on Bay Street, which is said to be rat infested and has been serving as the home of vagrants for years?

Permit me to offer a reasonable solution to this perceived problem. Stop paying contractors to remove those old buildings and let the work be done "only" by the Ministry of Public Works "after" a decision of Cabinet.

– BERYL FAGIN