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Norfolk priest's heart is still in Indian slums
Norfolk priest Pat's heart is still in Indian slums
Blofield priest Rev Pat Atkinson has recently marked 40 years of local church ministry but she is better known for her work in India with slum children, cancer patients, lepers, and street elders. Keith Morris reports
Back in 2006, Pat was awarded an MBE for her work and before that, in 1996, featured in Esther Rantzen’s Hearts of Gold TV programme
Now 76, Pat still takes a handful of services a month and says: “I love it at Blofield and don’t want to give up yet”
But a large part of Pat’s life and heart remain firmly in south India with the Vidiyal Trust charity
“In Madurai in Tamil Nadu, where the main work is, we run a residential sheltered home for street elders, where we can accommodate 36 old ladies and men,” she said. “In one specific slum we provide lunch for 52 ladies every day, most of them would not get a hot meal otherwise
“Some 110 slum children come to our tuition centre morning and evening. There is no electricity water or sanitation in the slum itself, but we have a generator
“We do a lot of work with children with cancer from isolated village or city slums who otherwise could not even afford to get to the small local hospital, which often runs out of medication – which we try to source. When they recover we follow them back to their villages to support them
“We still support a leprosy colony of 39 families with a monthly supplement bag and emotional and psychological support. Also a Saturday centre for the children who are not allowed to mix more widely”
The other part of the charity’s work is in Mavelikara, in Kerala, where a children’s home was built after the Indian Ocean tsunami at Christmas 2004. “It made sense at the time and it worked beautifully until the pandemic,” said Pat. “But now there is less need for residential care and the pandemic put an end to the tuition classes. We now have a social worker setting up self-help groups. We don’t need the building anymore and because we own it all legally we can re-use it in a proper way and the charity is currently in talks with the local Christian Martoma Church for them to take it over and use it as a home for 60 destitute elderly people
Pat is very keen to remind churches or charities who purchase land or buildings for overseas projects to check on long-term ownership: “They will increase in value considerably over time, trusted staff may leave, but a person or group at some time will potentially have a valuable asset. Because we are a registered Trust in India as well as the UK we retain ownership of all of our assets so we can ensure that donations made will always be used for charitable benefit that we approve,” she said
“The work has been going on for 34 years now and we have done the best we possibly can with the resources we have and those funds have remained under contract and licenced to us and cannot be used in any other way”
Pat has never taken a salary for her work and always pays for her own trips to India which now number over 60, with help from family and friends
Muthakumar, who visited Norfolk in December, is a former client of the charity and one of its biggest success stories. Today he is Pat’s eyes and ears in India when she cannot be there and he manages all of the projects. He is among the literally hundreds of former sponsored children who today have university degrees and careers in engineering, IT, dress design and many other areas
India today is very different from 34 years ago, says Pat: “There are no street children in India anymore. The government has clamped down so strictly now that there are no children on the streets. They are in school and either with a family or a government institution. There are slum children though
“We are still looking after 250 people a day at the moment, whose lives are almost dependent on us to keep going on a day-to-day basis. Our work has saved hundreds of lives over the years
“The two ambulances we ran for 16 years in Kerala, manged over 500k home visits for people with terminal cancer. But the hospital has now taken over that work”
Pat is hopeful of the future though and thinks that in maybe 15 years’ time the need for such projects will be far less as the infrastructure of India develops at an incredible rate, says Pat
But problems remain: “The river in Madurai no longer has water it in,” says Pat. “Water is brought in once a week by the Government and the drought is getting worse. It only rained for four days last year”
“It has been amazing and I have had the most fantastic time, but it has also been very hard. Until you have laid in a hospital with malaria or dysentery or spent hours on the streets, you don’t really know the country. You need to be there amongst the people to understand what goes on
“People know what our motivation is. We are not trying to proselytize but we have changed people’s attitude towards Christians in Madurai. We are based on Matt 25 v 40, which says ‘Whatever you do for one of the least of these brothers and sisters you do it for me’”
www.vidiyaltrust.org
Read our previous story on this topic.
Pictured above is Rev Pat Atkinson with Indian colleague Muthakumar in Norfolk recently.
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