Hello! Welcome to my new blog! Do you remember me? Fundraising for homes for HIV orphans? Opening the Rainbow Home, and the Boys' Home for leprosy affected children, so that they could go to school like normal children? The monthly newsletters? The trips to the beach and the zoo with the Prem Nivas children? Living with the children as teacher and 'auntie'.? And if your memories go further back, to your supporting me when I did my bike ride to raise funds for leprosy treatment in 1994, and went out to work in India after I retired. It is a long time since I regularly wrote a blog. Tonight I have been looking back posts I wrote when I was volunteering for Brighter Future. I  was surprised that they were still on my computer. It was so nice to see the pictures of the children we gave a homes to, and the adults we were able to take into our hospice. We started with 5 children and soon had three homes with 100 infected orphans.  Some of the children are still in touch with ...

  Sadly it is 'Goodbye Awaas!' Awaas Seva Sadan closed its doors on 31st March 2025.  The founder of this home for senior citizens, Mr Ramesh Toshniwal, passed away in 2019,  followed by his dear wife, Prem,  in 2024.   Their children had other business commitments far from Lonavala and felt unable to continue their parent's 'dream refuge' for the elderly. 

You will have seen the devastation of bombed flats, hospitals, kindergartens and factories in Ukraine. Millions of mothers, children and older grandparents have escaped to Poland and smaller countries on Ukraine's borders, leaving their husbands and over 16yr olds behind to help defend Ukraine with the Ukraine army and air-force.  The women may well become widows and their children orphans as thousands of their men are being killed in the Russian bombing raids on the Ukranian  towns. Today a scheme began in the UK to let ordinary citizens offer a room to Ukrainian and Afghani refugees for 6 months. In the first hour 20000 people have registered to have a refugee. My daughter has offered her spare room.  On Saturday there was a candlelit gathering in the town centre of people holding candles to show solidarity and compassion for the people of Ukraine, to pray for them and all those killed in the fighting, Russians as well as Ukrainians.  People are wearing blue and ba...

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  You are probably looking forward to Holi, though as senior citizens you are probably not going to be throwing coloured powders at another. You may however, enjoy the bonfire of the Holika. I wonder if you have ever had one of the traditional foods, jacket potatoes, that are associated with Britain's Bonfire Day  on November 5th?   A jacket potato is a large one that is cooked in its own skin, though these days usually wrapped in aluminium foil (to prevent it getting black and ash covered), after making a few holes with a sharp knife in the skin, to stop the potato from exploding! It is then placed in the bonfire's red hot and glowing embers until cooked. I think that sweet potatoes could be cooked in a similar way.  Another British Bonfire Day tradition is eating to ffee apples - apples coated with a crunchy sugar-syrup toffee, on a stick. In the north of England ginger cake is traditional - rather like the cake we had at Christmas.   So my dear Awaas Par...

  I  confess to taking lots of photos but that is only when I am on holiday. I take them home and eventually get round to editing them and deleting the worst. My favourite editor was Picasa but that early Google product has been abandoned and replaced by Google Photos. If, like me, you take crooked buildings and un-parallel columns, you would have liked easy to use straightening tool. However, although my old photos are safe with Picasa, my new ones seem to be demanding a place on a cloud or asking me for money to increase my space! I noticed that most residents have smartphones so I wondered if they, like the younger generation, were 'snap happy' - meaning that they took lots of photos.  Judging to the response to the invitation to enter a photo competition, it seems not. I have come to the conclusion that smart phones are mainly used to send videos to one another on Whatsapp, accompanied by an invitation to forward them to friends near and far. Being free it is well use...