Founder's Statement
This movement was created as a platform to raise awareness, educate, and support individuals living with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) in Trinidad and Tobago.
When people hear the term chronic illness, their minds often go straight to diabetes or cancer. But conditions like Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are just as real, just as life-altering, and yet are rarely spoken about. Too often, those of us living with IBD or IBS feel invisible, like our pain isn’t understood and our struggles don’t matter.
Many of us live normal, healthy lives, and then one random day, symptoms appear out of nowhere. One day you’re living normally, and the next, with no warning, you’re told you have an incurable disease that you’ll have to live with for the rest of your life. None of us asked for this. We suffer in silence because we’re embarrassed to talk about the condition itself.
We no longer have the luxury of “normal lives” or “normal problems.” The hospital becomes our second home. We lose friends and relationships because we can’t go out. We miss school or work and feel as though life is slowly slipping away all because of an illness we never asked for.
Even if this illness doesn’t kill you, the constant hospital trips, the years of misdiagnosis, the treatments that fail, the medical bills, the emotional and mental toll, and the fading memory of what it feels like to live as a normal person, those things can break you.
But that is exactly why Project IBD TT exists.
Not just to spread awareness or share information, but to restore hope.
To remind every person living with IBD or IBS that they are not alone, that this illness does not define them, and that even though there is no cure, there is still a future.
Through community, shared stories, and collaboration with medical professionals, this movement seeks to bring light to what many of us have endured in silence, and to show that while life with a chronic illness may be different, it can still be meaningful, strong, and filled with purpose.
This is more than awareness.
This is about strength, faith, and the power to keep going even when life changes overnight.
