San Fer­nan­do East MP Bri­an Man­ning has dis­trib­uted ham­pers to 200 fam­i­lies with­in his con­stituen­cy of Ste Madeleine and Pleas­antville.

At the dis­tri­b­u­tion ex­er­cise on Sat­ur­day Man­ning said, “It is a con­tin­u­a­tion of a pro­gramme to work to help those who need the as­sis­tance right now. The Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture fa­cil­i­tat­ed the ham­pers and NAMDE­V­CO had gone a long way to help the more ven­er­a­ble per­sons.”

Al­so dis­trib­ut­ing ham­pers to fam­i­lies were the Mara­bel­la Fes­ti­val Coun­cil and the Car­rat Shed Bar to­geth­er with Fen Mo­hammed Stores all of Mara­bel­la. They ral­lied their troops and dis­trib­uted 50 ham­pers to fam­i­lies in that com­mu­ni­ty.

Car­rat Shed own­er Al­lan Camp­bell de­scribed the dis­tri­b­u­tion as a “project of love.”

He said: “There are thou­sands of peo­ple who are go­ing hun­gry in the coun­ty and based on the abil­i­ty to gen­er­ate some funds, we de­cid­ed to ex­tend our hands to cit­i­zens who are in need the most.”

Vice chair­man of the Mara­bel­la Fes­ti­val Coun­cil Valar­ie Mitchell said this was their way of giv­ing back to the com­mu­ni­ty. She said the peo­ple of Mara­bel­la have sup­port­ed the coun­cil for the past 20 years in Car­ni­val and many did so when they did not have many re­sources.

She said, “Through­out the years the com­mu­ni­ty has sup­port­ed us. Our main force these days is on Car­ni­val so that all the peo­ple come out and sup­port us we de­cid­ed that there are needy ones that we are go­ing to give to be­cause of this lock­down be­cause we know that a lot of peo­ple are out of jobs. How­ev­er, to­day we de­cid­ed to do the best that we can.”

Mitchell has called on oth­er in­ter­est groups to do the same in their ar­eas if they have not done so al­ready.