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According to Help Age India, 11% of India’s elderly population currently lives alone or with non-relatives. They also estimate that by 2025, 25% of those over 60 and 40% of those over 75 are likely to be living alone.
In the flux of India’s changing culture on family life, the elderly are becoming more and more displaced from the familiarity of their own homes. There are fewer joint-living families and more dual-working spouses which means there is less space and time dedicated to taking care of the elderly.
The survey conducted in Delhi and Mumbai by Help Age India among five hundred elderly people revealed that 12 % of them feel that no one cares if they exist at all. 13%of them said they feel trapped within their own homes. 21% of them feel alone and said they socialize with very few people, including their own children. Also, the survey states that those over 75, particularly women, felt severely isolated and lonely.
In response to this tragic problem, Joyce Meyer Ministries has established the Hand of Hope Old Age Homes. Currently there are four Old Age Homes in Andhra Pradesh serving 64 elderly persons. The residents of these Homes are those with the direst of circumstances. Many of the elderly people who come to stay at an Old Age Home have no other option for survival. Most of them have worked their whole lives until they can not work any more and living in the Old Age Home is their only means of survival. For some, the Home is a place of refuge from an abusive, unappreciative family.
The residents of the Old Age Homes are encouraged to find purpose in a range of activities including being involved with a local church, community out-reach, crusades, and programs organized at the Home. They are not just given shelter, clothing and food; they are also given an invitation to start a fresh life of purpose and dignity.
Kommu Sugunamma is an eighty year old lady who comes from an Erakala (gypsy) family. She worked her whole life as a traveling waste-paper collector. She would collect waste-paper from garbage dumps and streets all day and sell her findings to an iron shop. With this money she maintained a thatch-roofed hut and cared for three children. Her husband died at the young age of forty and she never remarried. When Kommu’s children grew up and got married they did not support her. On her search to find another way to survive, she discovered the Hand of Hope Old Age Home in Manuguru. Finally able to rest and seek a kind of fulfillment other than that of a daily struggle for existence, Kommu is enjoying her responsibilities at the Home. She wakes every morning to pray for the entire staff and resident body of the Home. Every afternoon she distributes tracks to nearby homes and shares the love of Jesus Christ who has changed her life. She tells everyone the testimony of her life. She says she is finally “living peacefully”.
Kofi Annan, United Nations Secretary-General, said, “Trees grow stronger over the years, rivers wider. Likewise, with age, human beings gain immeasurable depth and breadth of experience and wisdom. That is why older persons should be not only respected and revered; they should be utilized as the rich resource to society that they are.” We hope that by placing value on these elderly persons and providing them with care in their later years they will in turn be enabled not only be apart of a community, but actively give into it and better it.
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