UWI students get power outage aid

A protest by scores of UWI students living on the halls of residence at the Cave Hill campus after islandwide power cuts left them without water and food, prompted the university’s student services department to rush to their aid.

“We want water. We need a generator. Where is admin? We need a generator,” the students chanted in front of the UWI administration building. A short clip of the vocal protest has been circulating on social media.

Director of Student Services Dale Lynch told Barbados TODAY that the campus responded to the students’ cry by helping to buy food and basic necessities for the students of the Frank Worrell and Sherlock Halls.

Lynch said: “I came in at a point of need so I would say that the area of help that I participated in would have been to help address basic needs.

“So I could not tell you specifically what the concerns were but I can tell you that they would have been inconvenienced in terms of having food items that would facilitate easy preparations of food.

“As you would appreciate for all of us who are experiencing this inconvenience, our normal day to day way of doing things would have been severely affected.”

Lynch said about 280 to 300 students had been affected.

During the protest which started around 8:30 a.m., a group of students demonstrated in front of the administration building, chanting a call for water, a generator and for officials to respond.

Students were fed up that though they were paying for a generator there was none to service the halls of residence, Barbados TODAY was told.

The students had limited dry food items and some of their perishables had spoiled in the power outage. The students believed that the protest was their last resort to get a response from the university’s administration.