Dear Friends, If you have read our latest newsletter you might also wonder if there is still hope? At Karuna we are taking the road of HOPE with small positive improvements for animals and people. Our latest small project is the breakfast for the staff. At our Karuna clinic/shelter, the staff, all from the village, arrive for work at 7.30 am. After cleaning, feeding, bandaging the paralyzed dogs and starting treatment for inpatients, they go for breakfast at home. It takes about an hour and all the work stops here. In the meantime outpatients are arriving and have to wait. Going home for breakfast is also an opportunity to do something else quickly. In general there is loss of Karuna working time.
If we provide breakfast for the staff at the clinic/shelter, nobody can leave the premises and extra care for in-patients, nursing and maintenance can be accomplished. I estimate that per day we can save 5 working hours from the 8 staff available. The shared breakfast will also improve the interconnection between the staff. Problems can be resolved, some gossip shared and serious problems can come to the surface. There can be more support and understanding for each other. (I hope). Chandrayudu, our main cattle herder, was asking everyday “When is the food coming?”.

We have started on Saturday, November 23 – Sathya Sai Baba’s birthday. The breakfast will be prepared at the AHIMSA farm at Karunapalli, where the organic garden is and the large number of our rescued cattle. Behind this is the new wildlife rescue centre under construction. Some of the cattle herders need to walk a long way to come to work or to cut the cattle grass. Many times they bring no breakfast because it is not available in the house. They tend to share what is available which is also nice but as we have improved the feeding of all our animals this year, why leave the staff out?

We are starting this new initiative with personal money from the board members for the first month, finding out what the expenses are (we estimate it will be Rs 30,000 per month) and hoping to see the result on different levels. We are asking our friends and donors to support this new initiative, bringing animals and caretakers closer together. With love and hope, Clementien