Resh­ma Ra­goonath

Af­ter five years un­der con­struc­tion the He­le­na Charles Home for Se­nior Cit­i­zens, La Brea, was giv­en a $1.3 mil­lion shot in the arm to com­plete its fa­cil­i­ty Sat­ur­day. That, as Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple Dr Glenn Ra­mad­hars­ingh hand­ed over the cheque to the man­age­ment of the home at its Pier Road, Point D'or, La Brea, lo­ca­tion. He said it was to demon­strate "our un­wa­ver­ing sup­port for the He­le­na Charles Home for Se­nior Cit­i­zens and all its ini­tia­tives."

The min­is­ter said the home, which has been an on­go­ing project for the past five years, would be used as a mod­el for oth­er se­nior cit­i­zens homes with mod­ern fa­cil­i­ties for el­der­ly res­i­dents. He added: "You will help us to raise the bar of ex­cel­lence, in terms of how our se­niors should be treat­ed. "The top-notch ac­com­mo­da­tion - in­clud­ing the live-in fa­cil­i­ty, laun­dry, health care and spe­cialised psy­cho-so­cial pro­grammes - will be on­ly one com­po­nent of this ex­am­ple you can set. "The rest comes from your ded­i­cat­ed staff and the way you treat our se­niors with re­spect and care, while pre­serv­ing their dig­ni­ty," Ra­mad­hars­ingh said.

The in­sti­tu­tion, which has the sup­port of T&T Olympic gold medal­list Hase­ly Craw­ford and cor­po­rate cit­i­zens, is ap­proach­ing its 80th an­niver­sary. Ra­mad­hars­ingh said the min­istry was work­ing on widen­ing the reach of its se­nior ac­tiv­i­ty cen­tres by tak­ing ac­tiv­i­ties, such as ex­er­cise and sport, and "mak­ing them avail­able in com­mu­ni­ty cen­tres, church­es, tem­ples and mosques across the coun­try."

Fol­low­ing the hand­ing-over cer­e­mo­ny, Ra­mad­hars­ingh went to the Rousil­lac Com­mu­ni­ty Cen­tre, Rousil­lac, to roll out the min­istry's Di­rect Im­pact Project through which cit­i­zens can ac­cess grants and pro­grammes avail­able in his min­istry.