Hethersett a norfolk village on the web

The church held a special evening with Indian cuisine and a presentation about the Vidiyal Trust from the Rev Canon Pat Atkinson. Pat outlined her and the trust’s work with street children in Southern India.

In a special article we look at the work of Pat and the Trust.

At the age of just nine Pat heard a missionary speaking about India and this left an indelible mark on her life. So much so that she wrote to her Bishop and even got invited to tea!

For a time Pat put any thoughts of working in India on the back burner as she became a nurse. Subsequently Pat became a deaconess in the Church of England and worked at the Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital for seven years before joining the YMCA in Norwich where they had a project in India for which she volunteered.

Pat admitted that what she found in India left her "shattered." . "I was horrified by what I found but over the next few weeks I fell in love with the place."

"I thought that visit was a one off . We helped build a school and I got to know some of the children and it turned out to be the first of 34 visits."

Pat soon learned that wages for the worst kind of work could be around 30p a day. But the situation was much worse than that:

"We found that children died on the streets and nobody cared about them. Children were being forced to join paedophile rings and many of them had kidneys taken for transplant.

"Life expectancy is only 50. In families, daughters go into prostitution. There are many suicides and many diseases including oral cancer and TB. In Mellawassal only one in five children see their seventh birthday."

Pat began to work with "the untouchables." She explained that according to the Hindu religion an individual can move up and down the "cast ladder". Some people suffered the indignity of going as far down as it is possible to go and moving completely out of the cast system. This literally made them out of cast or outcasts.

"They are then forced to do filthy jobs that nobody else will do," Pat explained, adding that streets often run with open sewage and rat bites and rabies are sadly all too common.

As well as Mellawassal Pat has also been working in Mavelikara and also supporting victims of the Tsunami in Sri Lanka. At the present time the Vidiyal Trust sponsors around 150 children in the two countries and money raised from donations and the meal at Hethersett was destined to help with the running of two ambulances in rural India.

The Vidiyal Trust has its own web site which can be accessed by clicking here. In recognition of her work Pat was awarded an MBE. In the photograph above she is pictured with her volunteer support team who provided the food.

Photo gallery of the evening (click on the photos to open a larger image)