Carisa Lee

A Paramin man has be­come the sub­ject of wide­spread ap­pre­ci­a­tion and ap­plause af­ter find­ing a bag con­tain­ing thou­sands of dol­lars and re­turn­ing it to the own­er.

Earnest Con­stan­tine has been her­ald­ed by many on so­cial me­dia for his hon­esty at a time when the ma­jor­i­ty of news has been de­press­ing.

“This is very en­cour­ag­ing, es­pe­cial­ly with so much neg­a­tive news,” David Tardieu said on Face­book of his deed.

Farmer Cor­nelius Camp­bell had lost the cash meant to pay work­ers and sup­port his fam­i­ly while or­gan­is­ing his har­vest re­cent­ly.

“Nor­mal­ly, I does sell chive whole­sale but it have one of the Fri­days I re­ceived mon­ey for the past three weeks that I sold. I col­lect­ed the mon­ey but in do­ing so, I took the mon­ey and I put it in a bag to­geth­er with some con­tain­ers and stuff like that on top the jeep, whether breeze blow and blow out the mon­ey in­side a drain,” the farmer said.

Camp­bell said he was sur­prised by the 20-year-old’s ac­tion, es­pe­cial­ly since he is of­ten looked down up­on in the com­mu­ni­ty.

“This young man end up call­ing me and when he call me he said ‘Ra­hee, I see some mon­ey in the road’. With my sur­prise, we col­lect­ed all the mon­ey and I feel so so ap­pre­cia­tive of that young man,” Camp­bell ex­plained.

The farmer ad­vised peo­ple not to judge a book by its cov­er.

Paramin farmer Cornelius Campbell.

D' Life of PARAMIN page.

Mean­while, mem­ber of the Paramin Men’s Min­istry Win­ston Eu­gene, who knew Con­stan­tine since he was a ba­by, said he knew he had a good heart.

The el­der in the com­mu­ni­ty said the young man, who de­pends on odd jobs dai­ly to sur­vive, just nev­er got the op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­cel.

“It’s a young man who is strug­gling in so­ci­ety right now...what he showed there is just in­cred­i­ble,” Eu­gene said.

It’s one of the rea­sons why he shared the sto­ry of the no­ble deed on D’ Life of Paramin’s Face­book page.

The post now has over 1,000 shares and hun­dreds of com­ments.

“You have a blessed heart young man,” Eu­sta­cia Noel com­ment­ed.

“Your char­ac­ter speaks vol­umes of the kind of young man you are,” Ly­dia Camp wrote un­der the post.

Apart from praise from the pub­lic, Con­stan­tine has re­ceived a tablet and mon­ey. He al­so got some job of­fers.

“He’s al­so a great role mod­el for youths of his age group that you need to do the right thing out there and when you do the right thing, good things hap­pen for you and to you,” Eu­gene said.

The Paramin res­i­dent, who re­turned to the com­mu­ni­ty af­ter liv­ing in the US for 45 years, said sto­ries like these bring hope and that’s the oth­er rea­son he shared the sto­ry.

“We are not lost as a coun­try. Trinidad and To­ba­go is a beau­ti­ful coun­try, it’s a land of beau­ti­ful peo­ple, car­ing peo­ple,” he said.

SEE AL­SO: Tri­ni wins US$5 mil­lion in $20 Flori­da scratch lot­tery

CLICK FOR MORE NEWS