A Time for Giving at UWI
By Claudia Liburd
(St. Augustine, Trinidad) --- Yesterday the Trinidad and Tobago Student’s Association in collaboration with the Student Affairs Guild at the University of the West Indies (UWI) held a charity drive to aid the less fortunate.
During an interview with SKNVibes.com President of the Trinidad and Tobago Student’s Association (TTSA), Christian Strong explained the general purpose of the drive.
“The drive started today at around 1 p.m. and the charity drive will go up until the December 20 daily as a table will be located in the Humanities and Education Undercroft for people to place donations even if our group is not physically present” said Mr. Strong.
He continued, “Every club is mandated by the [student] guild to do at least one outreach program for the year but this year we decided that we want to focus more on homes in Trinidad and Tobago that are often neglected because there are the popular homes that are always chosen first such as St. Mary’s and St. Dominic’s as these are church based and there are a lot of smaller homes that people don’t know about.”
During the charity drive students are invited to bring food, clothing and financial donations to the Student Guild Office which is located at the Student Activity Centre on the UWI campus.
While the organization is still in the process of screening potential homes they currently assessing a home for neglected, battered and run away children in Sangre Grande.
The TTSA is the representative body for all Trinidadian and Tobago students on the UWI campus and through this venture President Strong expressed this hope to encourage social work in UWI students.
“We are hoping that this will bring about a different mind frame in University students to actually come out of the box and see what it means to be less fortunate. We want students who are not intimately acquainted with social work through a degree program to be exposed to it because most social workers do not get paid.
“In the future, we as students will be the future leaders to cure epidemics like these. The incidence of street children is very high. Anything that is an ill in society is not really shown in good light so people do not typically see or even hear about these things such a charity homes unless it actually…hits home”, closed Strong.
