Address of compassion in Anjar: Panjo Ghar

Vijaysinh Parmar TNN At a time when most middle-class families find it difficult to support two children,community health centre (CHC) superintendent in Anjar Dr Hitesh Thakker and his wife Yamini,have five daughters.Of these three were abandoned by their parents and adopted by the Thakkers.As if bringing up five children was not a Herculean task by itself,the couple found out that three of the children,including one of their daughters had either learning disabilities or were mentally challenged.This would have broken the spirit of any normal family,but not the Thakkers.Not only have they given meaningful lives to their own daughters,but Yamini now runs a home Shree Gauri in Anjar for special children suffering from learning disabilities,behavioural problems,Downs syndrome,cerebral palsy and related ailments.Today,the board outside their house reads Panjo Ghar meaning Our home in Kutchi.It has become the address of compassion in the region as many destitute and dejected persons turn to them for help.Our aim is to help these children become self-reliant and support their parents as they grow up.We train them to make wallhangings,purses,envelopes,dining sets,frames of clay and other such objects,apart from educating them in the ways of life,like developing their attention span,teaching them simple calculations and constructing sentences, says Yamini.But Yamini found out that training just the kids was not enough.We started training their parents as well.Slowly we came across women who were widowed at an early age or divorced and rejected by society.Simple schooling would not have met their needs.The women wanted to be self-reliant.So,we provided them a platform and a separate organisation to help women Shree Durga was born. Panjo Ghar is an umbrella organisation for all the bodies.At present,five children are ready go out into the real world and support their parents.They earn about Rs 1,500 every month.We want them to be capable of taking care of themselves ever after their parents are no longer with them.There are 45 children and 60 women with Panjo Ghar today, Yamini,who takes no financial support to run Panjo Ghar,adds.Interestingly,Yamini has a masters degree in human resource management from the US.But she has left all that to become the godmother of her extended family.Talking about her inspiration,she says,Our first daughter Gauri,11,has learning disability.The second daughter,Aaruni,10,was found near a village,badly injured by stray dogs in 1999.The third,Sambhavi,7,was abandoned by her father.The girl weighed just 960 grams when we found her and we were warned by the paediatrician about possible malformations,but we took her in. Their fourth daughter,Sakshi,4,who was born in 2006,is healthy while the fifth,Devi,3,was found in the common toilet of a market in 2007.When Yamini came to know that three of her daughters suffered from different problems,she left her job and started travelling across the country to get training from psychologists,psychotherapists and neurologist on how to bring up such children.While training our daughters we could imagine the pain and agony of the parents of children with such ailments.I felt lucky because I had the support of my husband who helped me get trained,but not all parents were as lucky as me.So,to help these children and to empathise with their parents,we opened Shree Gauri, says Yamini.She was recently facilitated with the Woman of the year award by the ladies wing of FICCI (Chennai) for being an agent of change.She has now purchased a piece of land in Anjar to open up a nonprofit hospital,full-time residential school for mentally challenged children and an entrepreneurship development centre for women.