Last night Sue and I went to our local community centre (Shrewsbury House) to watch a presentation by Captain Hari Bahadur Limbu about The History of the Gurkhas in Britain. It cost us £4.00 each, and all the proceeds went to the Panas Helping Hands Gurkha Veterans Support Fund.
Captain Limbu’s presentation described the history of the relationship between the Gurkhas and the UK …
… and then went on to talk about the Gurkha community in the Royal Borough of Greenwich (there are about 3,000 Gurkhas living the Borough) and the work being done by the Greenwich Gurkha Ex-Serviceman's Association.
Panas Helping Hands is a charity that is run by the owner of the Panas Gurkha Restaurant (Sujan Katuwal) and besides providing over 100,000 free meals during the COVID pandemic to essential workers, people in homeless shelters and those attending community centres, the charity is now supporting Ukranian refugees.
Both Panas Helping Hands and the Greenwich Gurkha's Ex-Servicemen's Association deserve recognition and support for the work that they are doing but more importantly, they need resources. Panas Helping Hands has Go Fund Me pages for the work they do to support the Gurkha Ex-Servicemen and Ukrainian refugees in Southeast London and the provision of free food during the recent pandemic.
For more information about Panas Helping Hands, see their Facebook Page, their Twitter page, and Sujan Katuwal's Linkedin page.
What a wonderful group of hands on people. Let's face it, they are fighters!Adversity ? No problem!
ReplyDeleteJames Shepherd,
DeleteThey are ferocious fighters and undyingly loyal as well as being very quite, unassuming, and uncomplaining.
After the meeting, the taxi Captain Limbu had ordered failed to turn up, and he and the other Gurkhas who had turned up asked the way to the nearest bus stop. As it is about 100 yards from our house, my wife and I showed them the way. When we got there, the next bus wasn’t due for nearly twenty minutes, so I offered them a lift into the centre of Woolwich. It took lots of persuasion but they eventually accepted, and I dropped them off close to where they needed to go. As a result, my wife and I have now been invited to a Gurkha celebration at Woolwich Barracks later this year.
Most of the 3,000 Gurkhas living in Greenwich are pensioners who are living on British Army pensions … which are much lower than the equivalent pensions paid to British ex-service people. It took a long time to get them the right to live in the UK. Now the battle to get them better pensions is being pursued with vigour by their supporters … including my wife and I.
All the best,
Bob