Nester Flanders-Skeete
By
Lorraine Waldropt-Ferguson
Have you ever started watching a horror movie and you keep wondering
when you will see the happy ending? Scenes that evoke an emotional
onslaught of pain, hurt and despair. It seems like too much to digest.
This is how I feel when domestic violence survivor/mentor, Nester
Flanders-Skeete talks about her experiences in a violent relationship.“It was licks like peas, both verbal and physical. I got married young, had my kids, but the domestic violence was a part of our lives from day one. I didn’t have anywhere to run. The beatings were terrible girl. Everyone knew but no one really reached out until later on. I remember running to my father and stepmother’s home once and them marching me back to my husband. ‘Yuh have to go back to yuh husband, that is where yuh belong!’, they said.” It became a cycle, my sons were young, I would get my licks, leave and then frustrated by nowhere and no one to turn to I would come back to the same situation. He was more than250 pounds; he used his size to intimidate me!”- remembers the mother of six.
The 52-year-old woman then scratches her head and begins another episode in her horror story-”I tuck away all these things girl, deep down in my head. I am digging them up to tell you. You see domestic violence victims try to forget the pain and suffering, tuck away the memories under the carpet but the truth is these things live with you, girl. Like one day my violator (then husband) was fixing the water heater and I turned it on by mistake. Well boy, I missed his cutlass swing by an inch. Like if I was in a trance. I just grab my children and run”.
“Did you return? I ask to which she laughs cynically. “You know how many times I leave and come back. The next thing I must tell you about battered women — we feel alone in the world. Is as if the world moving on and you just staying one place. In those days I was in my own bubble, I didn’t even know what was going on in the country or even in my village in Pointe-a-Pierre. All I know was I had to do everything possible to stay alive. Sometimes I wanted to kill him. Yes, ‘is either me or he have to dead’, I used to say until he silence me with some slaps and more and then the cycle started all over again,” the former Couva Junior Secondary School pupil enlightens.” Did you try to contact anybody at the Battered Women’s Association of Trinidad and Tobago or other help lines?- I am trying to decipher if she had enough options to leave the horrifying situation. “Hotline? In those days it didn’t have all the organisations and NGOs that exist today. All there was back then was Dateline, the TV Show. It was a Dateline show with former TV woman, Allison Hennessey, actually that made me realise that this situation wasn’t normal and that I should try to get out once and for all,” Flander-Skeete states.
That horror movie. As I listen to even more segments of violence, frustration and near-death attacks in this domestic violence survivor’s journal of experiences I realise why she stayed in the relationship for so long. Like many women in her situation she had no place to run to, no place to hide, no resources to make it on her own.
“I passed through hell on earth and I joined a Baptist Church and started building my spirituality brick by brick. By this time I had four children. And that was the thing, I had sexual issues too. I was raped at gunpoint when I was 18.” Wait, raped? It’s starting to feel like scenes from the movie Texas Chainsaw Massacre again. And then she inserts the many times she tried to commit suicide, her heart problems and nervous breakdowns due to stress…
Ahhh! but after a few minutes my moment has come, the storyline begins turning around, the happy ending is coming. The saga continues- eventually, Flanders-Skeete decided enough was enough. An inkling of independence and a new purpose engulfed her as she enrolled as a security guard and made her ultimate move out of her abyss of domestic violence. “I moved out for good. I had become stronger to face my reality. Girl, I just get this drive from God to delete myself from the pain. I move out yes!”
Her children stayed with their dad, fatherhood was an art which he perfected, explained the former employee of Self-help for the Elderly. With time the new and improved Nester Flanders-Skeete sought the help she needed from various helplines which were now emerging in Trinidad. And, she met a new guy who treated her as a queen and gave her the support she badly needed. Soon her wounds began to heal. “Healing could not have taken place without my deep spirituality and the people I met who helped greatly in the later half. Girl, is my new love who really bring me out of it too. We used to just sit down and talk about life. Soon I start to come to terms with my bad past and healing started!”
But the real happy ending is brainchild NGO, Domestic Violence Survivors Reaching Out (DVSRO), an organisation which Flanders-Skeete founded three years ago. A group of domestic violence survivors, qualified personnel, and friends, coming together as the voice of the scared, silent and abused, DVSRO’s main focus is to stop the violence in homes, communities and schools. “This idea came to me because I wanted to be the voice for others, the voice I never had in my years of pain. Our mission is to reach out to the confused, misused, and abused in domestic violence. We want to open the eyes of those who are and could be potential victims. Identifying the red flags even before it happens, reducing the risk surrounding domestic violence and encouraging them to speak up and seek assistance; those are some of our goals. Breaking the silence and cycle, and identifying what is domestic violence and even the red flags by which it can be recognised are also real important in saving a woman who is being abused,” she declares.
Today she is the one many organisations turn to for help with domestic violence and other cases against. Through DVSRO, Flanders-Skeete also provides outreach, workshops, motivational talks and more to many communities in T&T. Her source of funding on many occasions are through fund-raisers such as barbeques but through her commitment and that of others on her team she is successful in carrying out her new purpose which is to save as many women as she can before it’s too late.
“Before its too late like what happened to Marcia Henville. She was a good friend of mine and someone who I referred my cases to at times,” sighs the vibrant leader on the death of media personality and activist, Marcia Henville. I sigh as well.
Very soon DVSRO will undertake a new initiative to build a Home for Battered Women. I acknowledge with awe the fact that Nester Flanders-Skeete’s plot has changed. I get my happy ending but it’s not just the perfect conclusion for my interview but the perfect SOS for many women out there in the midst of domestic violence and other social ills.
Source: http://www.trinidadexpress.com/woman-magazine/I-am-a-survivor-of-297095171.html
No comments:
Post a Comment