The behaviour of the residents of Toco and its environs over the weekend is a reflection of one of the more endearing faces of Trinidad and Tobago. Extending a helping hand to people in various stages of distress is almost instinctive among Trinbagonians who, as much as any, and perhaps even more than most, are quick to empathy and compassion.

This is a truth that is sometimes lost in the rancorous babble that often passes for national conversation in this place, with some of our more high-profile citizens lining up on either side of the political/ethnic divide even as people rally around each other on the common ground.

It is true that in the willingness of the country folk to help alleviate the distress experienced by ’town people’ stranded by the collapse of ’Balandra Bridge’, there was an element of self-interest, domestic tourism being important to the district’s welfare, but there was more than a cold-hearted dollars-and-cents calculation at work here.

Indeed, we would not be stretching a point were we to insist that even without a value having been placed on the weekend visits of these local ’tourists’, food and shelter would still have been forthcoming as people rallied to help without a thought as to the race or party affiliation of either the giver or the receiver, shared nationality and humanity being all that was important.

This was the heart-warming picture drawn on Tuesday in this newspaper’s exclusive report on how the stranded community was coping with the stress and inconveniences caused by the bridge’s collapse, the richness of detail not excluding obdurate Trinidadians who ’fed up eat chicken’, swore to ’vomit’ at the sight of any more sardines, and then there was this man who insisted one of his ’minders’ buy him cigarettes.

Few, if any Trinidadians, would fail to recognise these types who are also a part of this country’s cultural mosaic but they will recognise, too, the outpouring of camaraderie and good feeling, often expressed through humour, that marked the informal alliances formed among virtual strangers as all tried to make the best of an unexpected and uncomfortable situation.

It is a universal truth that often it takes mishaps and even tragedies to bring out the best in a people and, while wishing for neither, the country should derive some understanding of itself in the wake of this and many other past such occurrences-there is much more to be praised in us than we sometimes think, given the bad press that others sometimes give us and, to be honest, we sometimes give ourselves.