In 2012

Build Homes and Change Lives

Project Helping Hands

will link people who want to help

with homeless families living with HIV-Aids

How you can make a home happen this year....

1. Form a group of 3 to 10 people (family or friends) and plan to raise between £1000-£1250 in six months. This money will be a major part of the cost of the house. The balance will be funded by gifts in kind, (cement and stones) and by other agencies in India.

    

2. Some of your group may decide to visit the project site to help with the construction of a home and discover more about rural life in this area of India (maybe as a part of a holiday or Gap year). Volunteers will need to cover the costs of their flights, insurance and travel within India. If no one is able to make the trip, your group will still be kept in touch with the progress of a particular family's home via a facebook link.

    

3. Your group is given details about a family in need via a facebook link. Age of mother, children and present accommodation.

    

4. Volunteers work work with local people on the construction of the house for the duration of their stay (normally 10-14 days) and are also given exposure to the wider area and village life. Free accommodation will be provided at Birds Heal Campus. All meals will be local recipes*. Drinking bottled water is advised.

    

5. Volunteers return to the UK and tell their group and others about their experience of the project. Updates will continue to be given on the progress of the building work via facebook link.

    

6. The house is completed and the family moves in. Pictures and translated comments are posted on the group's facebook link. Final cost of materials, labour charges and other costs are posted on the facebook link with a breakdown of the amounts contributed by the group and by other agencies or the government if any.

   *A reasonable donation towards the extra costs of providing food would be appreciated.

Open Hands India supports projects that are working in and with rural communities to provide access to education, health-care and improved incomes for the poorest people in those communities.

Background to this project

The Birds Heal project in Jevargi has been promoting social improvement, education and health care in the villages of Jevargi Taluk since 2001. They now have well established links throughout this very rural area.

Since 2005 the Theresa Dispensary on the Birds Heal Campus has been running an active programme providing long term care, support and education to the people of the district living with HIV-Aids and so have a great deal of in-depth knowledge of the practical difficulties and needs of this particular group.

Throughout India there are various supported housing schemes available to people with low incomes but most assume that families applying for such schemes will be able to pay in part for the construction or be in a position to repay any loans provided.

The problem for most of the poorest families living with HIV-Aids is that they are not in a position to provide even a part payment or to undertake a loan repayment scheme when due to sickness or death each family's earning capacity becomes very marginal.

These families often consist of a widowed* mother and her children who will have found herself no longer wanted in the household of her deceased husband's family.

Building simple village houses for such families will provide much needed support and security for those who are at present homeless or living in very inadequate accommodation. (Inadequate by rural Indian standards which are not high)

*The position of widows in many areas of India remains very difficult.

This project is aiming to build 5 such homes in 2012 with the target of completing 40 by the end of 2014.

Open Hands India .

(Other People's Educational Needs, Health And Necessary Development Schemes) has supported the work of the Birds Heal Project since 2006 in various ways. As the project has developed we have continued to support the work of the mobile clinic that makes regular visits to ten particularly isolated villages in the area and holds health camps and health education visits and film shows across the whole of the Taluk throughout the year.

Open Hands India (Charity reg. no. 1116011) www.openhandsindia.com