First Cit­i­zens Clarke Road Unit­ed en­gaged the im­me­di­ate com­mu­ni­ty of Pe­nal to un­der­write the costs of pro­vid­ing much need­ed elec­tron­ic learn­ing de­vices to 14 stu­dents of the Clarke Road Hin­du School.

The de­vices, Ama­zon Fire HD8 tablets, were hand­ed over to the school on Thurs­day by club mem­bers and for­mer na­tion­al crick­eters Gre­go­ry Ma­habir and Mukesh Per­sad, who both live with­in a half-mile ra­dius of the school.

First Cit­i­zens Clarke Road Unit­ed has long been a lead­ing fa­cil­i­ta­tor of com­mu­ni­ty, sport, ed­u­ca­tion­al and per­son­al de­vel­op­ment in the rur­al South­ern Com­mu­ni­ty.

The club’s home field at Wil­son Road, Pe­nal and it sits right at the core of an eco­nom­i­cal­ly chal­lenged zone and our peo­ple have been se­vere­ly af­fect­ed by the coro­n­avirus (COVID-19) pan­dem­ic.

The vul­ner­a­ble un­der­bel­ly of our so­ci­ety, es­pe­cial­ly in our ge­o­graph­i­cal area, has been graph­i­cal­ly ex­posed to the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, and we are grate­ful for the con­tri­bu­tions of all Cor­po­rate cit­i­zens who stepped for­ward to de­liv­er help to some of these needy fam­i­lies.

As a club, de­spite se­vere bud­get cuts and oth­er re­source re­stric­tions, we were still able to dis­trib­ute ham­pers and en­sure our fa­cil­i­ty is kept in a rea­son­ably us­able con­di­tion so com­mu­ni­ty users can con­tin­ue to get some much need­ed phys­i­cal ex­er­cise and recre­ation.

Ac­cord­ing to club of­fi­cial Bal­dath Ma­habir, "For this par­tic­u­lar ed­u­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive, we reached out to friends, mem­bers, vil­lage busi­ness­es and the re­sponse was very, very en­cour­ag­ing. We are still op­ti­mistic that though we hand­ed over four­teen de­vices to­day, that we will be able to pro­vide a few more with­in a cou­ple of weeks. Our club wish­es to thank all those per­sons and busi­ness­es who an­swered our call, as they too would be ex­pe­ri­enc­ing their own Covid 19 chal­lenges. Best wish­es to the Prin­ci­pal, staff and stu­dents of Clarke Road Hin­du School."