Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Lo­cal NGO Se­wa TT has re­ceived over­whelm­ing do­na­tions from gen­er­ous mem­bers of the pub­lic for their clothes and book ex­change set for No­vem­ber 16 and 17. How­ev­er, they are now ask­ing for vol­un­teers to as­sist them with sort­ing more than 15,000 pieces of cloth­ing and 1,000 books be­fore they open their doors to the pub­lic in two weeks.

“We have about 1,000 man-hours al­ready catered for but I feel like we need at least 5,000 man-hours to get every­thing done prop­er­ly,” head of the or­gan­i­sa­tion Re­van Teelucks­ingh said when Guardian Me­dia vis­it­ed the Di­vali Na­gar au­di­to­ri­um where a few vol­un­teers with the NGO were sort­ing out the do­nat­ed items.

“Peo­ple still call­ing us and ask­ing us if they could give. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, we can’t ac­com­mo­date any more. We just don’t have the space for it,” Teelucks­ingh said

Com­ment­ing fur­ther on the over­whelm­ing show of sup­port from cit­i­zens, he said: “I al­ways say . . . Trinidad and To­ba­go is a re­al gen­er­ous coun­try.”

He said any­one who wish­es to do­nate some of their time to help those in need can vis­it them any week­day at the au­di­to­ri­um be­tween 6 pm and 9 pm.

“They’ll come af­ter work. They’ll come and help us,” he said with con­fi­dence.

The dri­ve will al­low mem­bers of the pub­lic to get text­books, nov­els, sto­ry­books, In­di­an wear, suits, shoes, wed­ding dress­es, ba­by clothes and more for free. giv­ing these items a “sec­ond life”.

Se­wa TT has been ac­tive, em­bark­ing on re­lief ef­forts dur­ing times of need in T&T. They re­cent­ly as­sist­ed res­i­dents of the Bam­boo com­mu­ni­ty who were se­vere­ly flood­ed fol­low­ing the pas­sage of Trop­i­cal Storm Karen as well as last Oc­to­ber when most of north Trinidad was dev­as­tat­ed by tor­ren­tial rains.