St. Jude Center for Children

By CECILY ASSON Monday,
January 19 2009

“This is me crying out to you, to do something,” pleaded Senior magistrate Lucina Cardinez-Ragoonanan during a breakfast address Saturday at the Royal Hotel, San Fernando, held to officially launch The St Jude’s Centre for Children and Senior Citizens.

The centre is a privately funded Non Governmental Organisation formed two years ago by Trinidad-born New York benefactor Sherilyn Michtavy, and is based in San Fernando. The foundation’s mission statement is to reach out to thousands of abused and abandoned children and neglected senior citizens.

Cardinez-Ragoonanan told the small gathering that if the country was to improve, everybody including those who held authoritative positions had to adopt a hands-on approach and contribute in a meaningful way just as she has done and has vowed to continue to do, even in her capacity as a sitting magistrate..

She asked: “Who else would do it? It is not easy, but we have the moral authority to do and make things better, and also make things happen.”

She said she became involved in the work with the less fortunate because “I wanted to do it differently,” and to prove she was committed to the cause, Cardinez-Ragoonanan has donated her childhood home on Marryat Street, San Fernando, to a charity foundation in memory of female boxing champ Giselle Salandy, who was recently killed in a vehicular accident.

Saying that she has been heavily criticised for being outspoken, and becoming involved with some of the cases coming before her in the family court, Cardinez-Ragoonanan publicly spoke out for the first time about her decision to adopt an eight-month old baby, one out of a family of three children who had been abandoned by their parents. She said she could not have turned her back on the baby after there was no room for the toddler at the foster home, and instead took the challenge although “I was terrified,” she added.

Jasmine is now three years old, and I have not regretted the decision, she added.