New Jersey Arya Samaj Mandir, Inc., / Guyana Central Arya Samaj Humanitarian Mission building house for needy family in Guyana

Kaieteur Newspaper Monday, April 28, 2008

WILLIAMSBURG, CORENTYNE - The New Jersey Arya Samaj Mandir, Inc. Humanitarian Mission, through the Guyana Central Arya Samaj, is soon to commence construction of a home for a less fortunate family.
Iris Latchman, of Rose Hall Town on the Corentyne, is now homeless. The shack she once called home crumbled to the ground last month on a windy day. “Me know it woulda fall, and the day me sitting by me daughter house and about ten o’clock it fall flat. Me lose everything me had. Some people help me buy back a kerosene oil stove and one-one thing.

”The woman was taken in by her eldest daughter, Camille Latchman, and lives in the quarters below her. “We put two zinc sheet and so, and we try to mek it a home for now, because we ain’t got nowhere else to live.”
The 60-year-old has four adult children, two of whom are boys. Three of them are mentally challenged. “All of them, except the big one, something wrong with them. Them stupidee and they born with a foot problem, and me and them can’t walk properly. People does take advantage of them when they go to get li’l wuk.”
There is not much that her eldest daughter, Camille, can do for them. She assists at a nearby shop. “Me sister is 24 and she not so proper, and is the same thing with my two brothers. Me mother get limp foot, too.”
She said that her reputed husband is a farmer and she has three young children of her own to cope with. “All of them, me brothers and sister and me mother, does beg around, but me is the one with the education. When me father left we were small. I got asthma, and since me small me had to go begging to mind we. People does give we li’l black pepper, salt, massala, dhol and so, and we collect them and live on that.”
The Arya Samaj is now in the process of taking the necessary estimates.

Iris Latchman is grateful to the organization. “Nobody ever help we like that. Me so glad they helping we, and soon me gun get me own house.”  The New Jersey Arya Samaj Mandir, Inc. was established in 1987. Its Humanitarian Mission was established in 2005 to help the less fortunate children and elderly persons across Guyana.

In March, Dr. Ramesh Sugrim, Head of the Humanitarian Mission, handed over $100,000 to assist seven-year-old Farziena Ali of Betsy Ground in East Canje. The child is scheduled for heart surgery in India.  Each year, under the humanitarian mission, hundreds of children receive supplies, preparing them for the new academic year. Humanitarian Mission 2008 is scheduled to commence in July.