May 2002
SUSILA
DHARMA - THE HOME FRONT
How often does your mind travel to Frampton-on Severn and to an early Subud project: Wisma Mulia?
Possibly for many of us, its location in the quiet, secluded hamlet, close to the River Severn, reflects its place in our consciousness.
Wisma has increasingly urgent material needs: residents are growing older and more frail, support has to be adapted and enhanced, and all this in a political climate which imposes such a burden of bureaucracy.
We dedicate much of
our energy and time to ensuring that the truly admirable projects
abroad are able to function and thrive.
Here, a few hours’ drive away, on our doorstep, is this long
running project. Subud
members are so responsive to the needs of humanity through the world
– let us be so at home.
PLEASE OPEN YOUR PURSES!
Therefore in this edition of SD(B) News, we want to draw your attention to a very specific Wisma Mulia appeal. It is described for you in this edition.
Please read it, please feel this need, please commit to an active, positive response.
We will report to you
on the progress of this appeal and on the progress of the installation
of the proposed bathing system that we believe will make such a
difference to everyone’s life.
A MUSICAL OFFERING
Already, a Subud brother has responded with real generosity. Robert Millard has just made a CD. He has pledged the proceeds from the sale of this CD to the Wisma Mulia Support Fund. The more of you who purchase a CD, the easier it will be to purchase the special bathing facility. Buy one for your own enjoyment and buy one for a friend!
Printed below is Robert Wilton’s review of this CD.
Lance Edwards has also
reviewed it: read his review in the SB Bulletin.
HEROES
ARE HARD TO FIND
Musical virtuosi are a rare breed, and the most publicly successful of them may enjoy a well-deserved celebrity status. Paradoxically, however, they are also likely to inhabit a lonely world, their talents and tastes separating them from the imperfections and compromises of our ordinary world – which needs, yet does not value them. But a brave new CD, featuring a Subud artist, clearly does: and magnificently so.
Robert Millard, after years of musical silence, celebrates here, as a latter-day virtuoso, the worlds of two heroic piano virtuosi of the past. Liszt was a showman, a priest, a womaniser, a poet – and a genius. He electrified the nineteenth century with his brilliant reworkings of Verdi, Wagner and other composers of his era, no less than with his own original works of romantic splendour. And Rachmaninoff, closer to our times, carried on the Lisztian tradition into the twentieth century, with a smouldering romanticism and a blazing passion that wholly identified with the conflicting feelings generated by the two world wars through which he lived: the oppression and the suffering, the despair and the compassion, the tragedy and the triumph.
On this excellent new CD, a timely and unexpected gift, Robert dauntlessly demonstrates the continuing relevance to our deeply troubled world, of heroic values and high culture expressed through the music of these two artists of two centuries. He shames, with is own blazing virtuosity, the shallow posturings which our degraded times have come to call art. He shows us again what art can be, should be. Buy this disc. We all need its inspiration – for, especially today, heroes are hard to find.
Review
by Robert Wilton, 8.4.2002
SUSILA
DHARMA BRITAIN APPEAL FOR AN ASSISTED BATH AT WISMA MULIA
Susila Dharma Britain is raising funds to help install an assisted bath and hoist to allow all residents of Wisma Mulia to bathe, irrespective of how mobile they are.
Wisma Mulia is a high quality residential home in Frampton-on-Severn, set up in 1973 primarily for retired Subud members. It is owned and operated by Fountain Housing Association, a registered charity started by Subud members. Wisma Mulia currently accommodates 23 people, between 74 and 99 years old. Some resident are physically active, whilst others require assistance or a wheelchair to move about.
Bathing is beneficial both physically and mentally; it is something that most of us take for granted. Conventional bathtubs are designed for the able-bodied, but for the elderly, diminishing mobility makes it increasingly difficult to get in and out of the tub.
Some residents of Wisma Mulia are unable to take a bath at all. Showering is only an alternative for those strong enough to stand. The solution to this is an assisted bath with a mobile hoist that can lift someone from their wheelchair or bed to the bath and lower them right into the tub.
The equipment enables staff to bath residents safely without it becoming an exhausting or stressful experience for either party. Baths are also available with a hydromassage facility. This can constitute an element of treatment for arthritis and circulatory problems because it stimulates the circulation. We want all residents to be able to enjoy the benefits of bathing.
The cost of purchasing and installing a new, recumbent bathing system and integrated mobile hoist would be approximately £15,000.
Susila
Dharma supports many excellent projects round the world. We would
like to do more to help people in this country and so have launched
this appeal on behalf of the residents of Wisma Mulia. If you would
like to contribute to the Wisma Mulia Support Fund, please send your
donations made payable to Susila Dharma (Britain) to the Treasurer:
Mark McElroy, 6 Lothlorien Close, Derby, DE23 2RY.
FOR SALE
Computer trolley, grey, very solid, fixed top shelf and narrower fixed lower shelf. 82cm(w) x82cm(d) x72cm(h)
Desk (ex army issue) 136cm (w) x 76cm(d) x 76 cm (h). Screw-on legs, shallow drawer either side.
Buyer collects. Price £15 each to be paid as a donation to the Wisma Mulia Support Fund. Phone Lorena & Suren de Silva on 01795 537365