TS WORLD CONGRESS IN ROME  10-15 JULY  2010

Report by TOS International Secretary, Diana Dunningham Chapotin

5 - Worldwide Service Activities

I thought I knew all about the service activities of these groups but I discovered that there are far more than I realised.  Meet Ebrony Peteli and Jayu Sampat of Kitwe in Zambia, for instance.  The members there organise public speaking contests for 15- to 18-year-olds on broadly theosophical subjects such as Simple living with high thinking. 

At the end of the Congress, Ebrony and Jayu took a bag of teddies knitted by the ladies of Milan, Forlì and Rome. 
They will give them to needy children in a hospital or orphanage in Kitwe.

The Tanzanians also took a batch of teddies home with them for the babies they help send to India for heart surgery.  In short, the Teddies for Tragedy project that the Italian TOS took up initially with the TOS in Tanzania has now spread to Zambia and Kenya, which is a quite wonderful thing! 

Photo:  Tara & V.M. Shah of Kampala, Uganda -  How did we miss out on entrusting a batch of teddies to Tara and V.M.  Shah of Kampala, Uganda?!

Another new project which I discovered only in Rome is a theosophically-oriented school near Bacolod City in the Philippines.  We have all heard about the Golden Link College in the outer suburbs of Manila but what about the just-opened Lumen School?  For a brief report and photos, go to the TOS website.

Here we see Vicente Hao Chin, Jr, the President of the TS in the Philippines, Rekha Nahar, the administrator of the Golden Link College
and Ruth Minerva Cruz, the administrator of the new Lumen School.

I had an interview of over an hour with the TOS President, Radha Burnier, on TOS matters.  I updated her on the Plan of Action that Dorothy Bell of Australia did so much to develop for us and I gave her a printed set of guidelines for new TOS groups that Ananya Rajan of the USA has recently updated.  I also gave her a copy of the booklet by Nelda Samarel already mentioned, Helping the Dying.  

Radha in Rome

Here we see Radha and her secretary of ten years, New Zealand member Bernice Croft.

Toward the end of the Congress, Radha Burnier, P. Krishna and Colin Price gave us a splendid question and answer session.  Really interesting answers came out of some unexpected questions at this session: “I want to practise brotherhood but I still feel compelled to swat wasps, cockroaches and so on.” “Did great masters like Beethoven practise brotherhood?” It is to be hoped that the recording of this session will be transcribed.

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