Ian Boughton has been writing stories

 about the work of

Health Help International

for several years. 

Out of the blue, he was invited

by the director, Ron Prosser,

to join a trip to Kerala Province,

south-west India, to see first-hand

the work of HHI's man out there,

the great Tom Sutherland.

This book, both funny and

touching, is the story of what he found. 

For supports of HHI, it brings

to life the real conditions in

which the people we help have

to spend every day of their lives.

An extract from Neesha...

You do not run a Christian establishment in south India without being a person of very strong character, and just outside the small town of Nedumangad are two more of the great characters of ministry, both of whom have worked alongside our man Tom Sutherland over the years.

At Trppadam hospice, Father Gabriel already has 60 patients in care, and will be doubling that with the building of a new ward.

Gabriel is a wily old bird. With floor-length saffron robes, long white hair and white beard, he looks straight out of the hippie era. His English is extremely good, he laughs a lot, and he mixes genuine care with a healthy cynicism.

The name Trppadam, he told us, means ‘holy feet’, and refers to his dream thirty years of starting a care home ‘and laying it at the holy feet of the Lord’.

“We need this place because the old tradition of big families living together has broken down. The average family now is one man, one woman and one child, and the care of the older ones has been neglected.”

In 1969, Father Gabriel was searching for likely premises when someone told him of a derelict soap factory which was being put up for auction. Gabriel went and met the auctioneer, who was a Muslim gentleman, and as a result of their meeting waited quietly in the auction until all the bidding seemed to have stopped.

At that point he bid 10 rupees, about 7p, above the last bid, and instantly the auctioneer banged his gavel and declared the sale complete.

“I think,” Gabriel tells us in the most innocent of tones, “he just didn’t want the Hindus to buy it…!”

He now accepts all castes, and never asks which faith a new patient follows – the main thing, says Gabriel, is that a newcomer needs help, and the carers only ‘impart’ the Christian virtue of compassion. Similarly, the clinic works on a combination of homeopathic, ayurvedic, and herbo-mineral medicines.

His dormitories are dark, and many of the elderly patients are asthmatic, many epileptic, many disturbed, and many have combinations of various complaints. Their days are now fixed in this place, and some of them rarely leave their beds, as they can do nothing else. One man, lying for no apparent reason in the hallway floor, turns out to have arrived there from family in England.

How does he keep the place going?

“I never wanted to just ask for money to run this place,” Gabriel tells me. “I wanted to make something and sell it.”

So he mixes the care of the elderly with some interesting commercial self-help work. The philosophy is shown by a sign painted on the workshop wall – ‘every home a temple, every home a workshop’.

There is a small but active programme of craftwork, and Nigel and I are fascinated to be given a demonstration of how incense sticks are made. This is a terribly dirty job, and many abandoned old people spend their days making them.

The sticks are coated with incense, and the messiest part of the process is the adding of the perfume. Each scent comes as a kind of watery syrup, which is poured on to a glass-topped worktable. Perhaps two dozen sticks are then rolled back and forth across this syrupy mess for a few minutes, then held out to dry.

Across the other side of the workshop, ladies are tearing pages out of old magazines and using them to construct tubes, which will end up holding a hundred sticks.

There is also supposed to be a business in handmade greetings cards, but Gabriel shrugs and says that when there is no demand for either, his hospice is in serious trouble.  Ron instantly places an order for several hundred greetings cards, which can come back to Britain to be sold at perhaps £2 each, thus providing two sources of support – the money for his original order will go to Trppadam, and the profit from sales will support causes as well.

Nigel and I decide to support the incense business, and after a few minutes’ choosing, we find we have picked a vast amount of incense sticks, at a total cost of 160 rupees, which we round up to two hundred, and which is still only about two pounds in English money. I do a little mental arithmetic and am astonished to find that if we were to sell them back at home for a fair price, we would make a profit of around £120.

From Ian's 'Neesha and the Tentmakers'