|
| Shina, Ernakulam |
|
Download Database of featured talents. (Excel file) |
Even
as a young girl, Shina dreamt of dedicating her life to take care
of an invalid who would need her attention everyday.
When she grew up and told her friends about it, they laughed.
But to 25-year-old Shiny it wasn’t a laughing matter.
On her own, she started helping bedridden patients, perhaps hoping
to find the young man whom she would have to take care for life one day.
When scope of her work increased, she formed a charitable trust in
collaboration with the Church and enrolled 10 volunteers.
It
was when she came to Kochi in connection with this work that she saw the
photograph of a young man, Manoj, paralysed below the waist, seeking
assistance for treatment. Accompanied
by a friend, she visited Manoj, who was lying in a ramshackle hut with his
88-year-old grandmother for help. Manoj,
whose parents had died when he was quite young, had studied for sometime
in an orphanage and had later chosen the profession of coconut tree
climber.
It
was a fall from a tall coconut tree that had incapacitated him.
After 2˝ years of stay in the hospital, when he could not even
move his limbs, he stayed on for another 4 years, undergoing 3 surgeries.
At the end of it all, with the mind and body debilitated, he had
resigned to the fate of an invalid when Shina came to his life.
Despite
many protests from Manoj himself as well as her own parents, she stuck to
the stand that she wanted to live with Manoj for the rest of her life.
And so it came to pass, when on October 30, 2003, Shina married the
young man about whom she had been dreaming of since childhood.
“Hearing
about our marriage, another young woman married a bedridden young man in
Kozhikkode. That brought a
lot of joy to Shina and me,” says Manoj, who considers his married life
a rebirth of sort.
Courtesy: Manoj K.Vazhamala (text), Streedhanam, March 2004
Contributed by: Administrator
