President Elect Molly welcomed Eliazar Rose as our speaker at the June meeting. Eliazar is the Director of the New Hope Rural Trust in Orissa, India, a charitable foundation which the club has supported for many years. He comes to speak to us whenever he is in the UK and this was his third visit.
About 15 years ago, the late Dorothy Mountford saw an appeal in a newspaper from New Hope asking for clean, used tights. It was then a leper colony and the tights were used to secure patients’ dressings, thus enabling the expensive bandages to go further. Dorothy brought this to the club’s attention and ‘the rest is history’.
New Hope will help anyone in need and a few years later the club sponsored the building of a 15 bed hospice for HIV positive children at New Hope. Later on we sponsored cataract surgery for the elderly, and most recently have given them a donation to help with rebuilding after a devastating cyclone.
Eliazar spoke passionately about his life at New Hope as the child of two leprosy sufferers, the stigma attached to that, and how he realised that he was not meant to be an engineer on the railways after all, but to give his life to helping others.
