The monthly Coffee Morning of Sarum U3A was held in our usual venue of St Francis Church Hall on Wednesday 20 September.

Members who have email were encouraged to receive their monthly Newsletter using this method and were asked to give their address to the Editor.  Members who deliver Newsletters were asked to collect them at the end of the morning.

The morning’s speaker was Robina Hattersley who travels annually in South India and she was to show us the sketch and paintings she had made on her most recent  trip earlier this year.  They were interspersed with vivid descriptions of the life she saw, stories and excerpts from her diary.

We heard about local work situations such as brickmaking and building a school and leisure activities – everywhere they enthusiastically played cricket.

She emphasised her feelings about the merits of self – sufficiency as opposed to payments made by charities and spoke very convincingly of a women’s self-help scheme in which the 20 women who belonged to the group contributed a small subscription which was used to finance business projects or social help for individual members of the scheme.  One very impressive example was of a woman who borrowed from the scheme with further investment from a bank in order to set up a brickworks.  It was so successful that she was able to employ other members of the scheme thereby providing an income for other families.  Other success stories showed very clearly that given the right circumstances self-help was a very effective system.

The sketches and descriptions we were treated to also included references to the consequences of the Tsunami when the wave swept 16 miles inland and in contrast to the great and tragic loss of life, a 6th Century sea temple survived unscathed.

It was a delight to listen with great admiration to the adventures of one of our own members travelling in remote areas and with only her backpack and very importantly her diary and paints.  It was clear that Robina had a huge affection both for the people, their activities and the area they lived in.  We were all spellbound.