The ship­ment of 1,000 cas­es of bot­tled wa­ter do­nat­ed by the group- Con­cerned Mus­lims of Trinidad and To­ba­go (CMTT) ar­rived in St Vin­cent and the Grenadines on Sat­ur­day.

How­ev­er, CMTTs Pub­lic Re­la­tions Of­fi­cer/ Trea­sur­er Im­ti­az Mo­hammed said there were some chal­lenges of­fload­ing the car­go from the ves­sel in a time­ly man­ner.

“Our part­ner on the ground SVG First Re­spon­ders re­ceived part (400 cas­es) of the ship­ment to­day (Sat­ur­day) and Mon­day the bal­ance of 600 cas­es will be cleared,” Mo­hammed said.

He added that the SVG First Re­spon­ders group was ex­pect­ed to start dis­trib­ut­ing yes­ter­day.

Last week the Con­cerned Mus­lims wrote to the Min­is­ter of Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty, Stu­art Young, seek­ing trav­el ex­emp­tions for a team of six peo­ple to trav­el to St Vin­cent in two weeks to dis­trib­ute the sec­ond ship­ment of re­lief sup­plies.

CMTT, al­so, launched its “Dis­as­ter Re­lief” col­lec­tion for St Vin­cent.

On Wednes­day, the group bought 1,000 cas­es of 1.5 litres of wa­ter equiv­a­lent to one 40-feet con­tain­er val­ued at $55,000, which were shipped to the vol­cano rav­aged is­land on Thurs­day at 8 am on one of the Cari­com boats.

CMTT said its col­lec­tion dri­ve con­tin­ues for the next two weeks af­ter which all re­lief sup­plies will be shipped to St Vin­cent.

When con­tact­ed about the trav­el re­quest from CMTT, Min­is­ter Young re­mind­ed that “we re­main in a pan­dem­ic and we are man­ag­ing our bor­ders, i.e. per­sons leav­ing and en­ter­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go.”

“Just re­cent­ly, we had to ad­just our re­sponse to the spread of COVID-19 via the Pub­lic Health reg­u­la­tions as the num­bers of COVID pos­i­tives are ris­ing,” he added.

Young al­so said that it is very un­like­ly that he would “grant ap­proval for per­sons to go to St Vin­cent and the Grenadines at this time, out­side of our of­fi­cial re­sponse.”

Con­cerned Mus­lims of T&T is a phil­an­thropic or­gan­i­sa­tion that has been en­gaged in do­ing hu­man­i­tar­i­an works through­out the world in­clud­ing the Caribbean for the past twelve years.