Dear Daniel - PM Kamla's letter to Daniel Guerra

File Photo: PM Kamla consoles Daniel's grandmother

Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar is expected to attend the funeral Wednesday of Daniel Guerra, the 8-year-old schoolboy from Gasparillo whose body was found in the Taruba river last month.

She is expected to read a letter she has written for Daniel, which she unveiled . Tuesday at a celebration of International Women's day. The letter is reproduced below:

Dear Daniel,

What can I say as a mother, grandmother and Prime Minister about the way your young innocent life was so brutally taken?

What can any of us who grieve offer by way of explanation for this senseless, heartless, heinous act?

But as unanswerable as these questions are, as deep as our grief is, as overwhelmed by outrage as we have become, there must be an appropriate response to the evil and depravity among us.

Daniel, your brief sweet light will continue to shine in our hearts and souls, guiding and inspiring us to right the wrongs, your untimely death, my son, must become the rebirth of an entire nation filled with outrage and burdened by a collective conscience that each of us must get involved and play our part in redeeming your memory and that of others who have suffered a similar fate, all victims of indifference, insensitivity and deferred responsibility.

Daniel, as your life touched all those who knew you with love and laughter, so too your tragic uprooting will instill in each of us a resolve to redeem your memory.

We will become our brother's keeper, our neighbour's nurturing friend, our children's guardian angels, always, all over.

If we have failed you in life we can only redeem your memory by making sure your death becomes a beginning of the end of the brutality that stalks our nation.

Today, and for a long, long time Daniel, the way you were taken away from us will remain as a painful national conscience of our failure to individually and collectively do enough or anything at all.

Daniel, you're everyone's brother. Daniel, you're everyone's son. Daniel, you're my own deep personal grief but you're my firm resolve to ensure your death brings to life an entire nation; a chain reaction of indignation and insistence that we will not endure this again.

Daniel, in your name, I proclaim - not as Prime Minister - but as a mother and grandmother, the Daniel Decree, a simple but powerful intention shared by the large majority of our nation's good, loving, law abiding and decent citizens to actively join in a national movement to effect a permanent social change in Trinidad and Tobago.

The Daniel Decree is a Dedication to defend our nation's children in your memory and others like you who have been so cruelly taken from us.

I intend to invite all the NGO's and religious organisations in the country to convene a meeting with the Commissioner of Police, Chief of the Defence Staff and other security personnel in attendance, which I will chair.

The purpose of this gathering will be to identify both social and crime fighting solutions and to create a catalyst for change.

Daniel, I know nothing we do now can turn back history but it must turn around the future you were denied. That is all I can say and no more that I can offer in your sweet loving memory.

May God Bless you and your Mom and each grieving member of our national family.

And may God Bless the renewal of our national commitment and efforts now.