ELDERLY people across India have many struggles and challenges. Failing health, running out of money and being unable to keep up with the fast-paced and changing world around them. India has more than 104 million senior citizens (ages 60 and above). While many elderly parents find ways to deal with these changes, what is impossible to cope with is abandonment. Some aged parents are entirely dependent on their children for support. When their children abandon them, the struggle becomes a matter of life and death.
Parents spend most of their adult lives caring for their children. But when their children leave them without offering any support, they are completely devastated, explains Share and Care’s founder Carmel, in this heartwarming video. On the one hand, they have no shelter, food or medicine. On the other hand, their hearts are broken because the people they have spent decades loving and raising have left them alone and in desperate need.
The suffering of neglected parents
Most of these elderly people live below the poverty line and cannot afford to eat more than one meal a day. They have no adequate housing, clothing, nutritious food, medical care and sanitation facilities. Due to a lack of these necessities, their health is severely affected, but they have no opportunity to improve their lives.
The senior citizens in this area suffer from partial blindness, hearing loss, high blood pressure, diabetes, tuberculosis, leprosy and have severe pain in their joints. Many also suffer from sleep disturbances and the psychological and emotional effects of abandonment.
This describes life for an elderly woman named Kamalamma. Carmel describes in this video how Kamalamma was left alone without anyone to take care of her and cried every day from depression. Share and Care started taking care of her along with many others who face emptiness without their children, spouses or anyone else to listen to their troubles.
These senior citizens are too old to work, and around three-quarters are women. From the most downtrodden sections of society, these elderly have traditionally had no access to education and have been shunned by others for as long as they can remember.
Share and Care’s mission is to care for the elderly
Carmel and Stephen Arokiasamy founded Share and Care in 1984 to meet the needs of ageing parents who have no support from their family members. The NGO looks after 400 elderly people in Chennai and Katchur village in Tiruvallur district who live in poverty and loneliness.
Share and Care provides dry food rations every month containing rice, flour, lentils, spices and other essentials which they use to cook their meals every day. Clothes, blankets and toiletries are given to them since most do not have more than one item of clothing and the extreme weather conditions can be harmful to elderly people. The NGO arranges medical camps, eye camps and lab tests, after which medicines are prescribed. The NGO also organizes hospital referrals for follow-up treatment and surgeries. Geriatric counselling, physiotherapy, traditional medicines and yoga are offered to improve mobility and psychological conditions.
Social gatherings are conducted to ease their loneliness and give the people someone to talk to. This allows them to make friends and lighten their mood with conversation and emotional support.
Share and Care needs your help
Giving a sense of self-respect to elderly parents left alone is the heart of Share and Care’s mission. But the NGO needs your help supporting these 400 elderly and abandoned senior citizens. Donate to their fundraiser on Give to care for the old and neglected without support. Your charitable donation will meet the needs of these grandparents and ensure their lives are filled with compassion and care. Donate now.
Shirley has been in the development sector for over 10 years and is passionate about making a change in the world around her, including adopting dogs and writing to make a difference.
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