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May 9, 2004

Inspiration for the day

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  SHINA: CHOOSING TO MARRY AN INVALID
Shina, Ernakulam

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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

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"Where there is a will, there is a way."