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Matthew
Norton
SKCV information
for SAOBA
SKCV
is a non - profit making, non - sectarian charity
working in the UK in
many areas, especially The North. Our main thrust is to gain help and
raise awareness of the sister Indian Trust which is working with, and
for, homeless children in Vijayawada City, a large, bustling town in the
southern Indian State of Andhra Pradesh.
For more details visit SKCVs
website now
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WHO
ARE WE?
We
are registered with Charities Commission:
No.1038063
Address:
5,Trinity Road, Sale, Cheshire. M33 3FB. England
Tel
: +44 (0) 161 973 5042
Fax:
+44 (0) 161 969 6718
Email:
d.norton@mcmail.com
Contact
persons: Dr. & Mrs. D.W. Norton (Chairman & Secretary)
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THE TRUSTEES
Dr.Desmond.W.Norton,
Mrs.Patricia.Norton,
Mrs. Lynn May,
Mr.Jack Kelsey
Mr.Richard May,
Mr.Peter Janvier,
Mrs. Diane Nice,
Dr.Ch.Bose
Mr.Maxwell Lee,
Matthew Norton (Founder)
(Indian
Name-S.Manihara Norton) |
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WHERE
DO WE WORK?
Why
Vijayawada & Coastal Andhra Pradesh - South India?
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Vijayawada
is known as the gateway between north and south India.
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It's
busy railway station acts as a lure to the children who eke
out a miserable, disease-ridden existence begging or working
as ragpickers and luggage carriers for as little as 10 pence
a day.
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There
are an estimated 19,000 street children in Vijayawada which
has a population of 815,000. SKCV cannot help all them, but
with your generosity it could help many more.
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HOW
DO WE WORK?
The
UK arm of the charity is run on a voluntary basis by the
founder's parents, Dr. Desmond and Mrs. Patricia Norton, from
their home in Sale, Cheshire. We put on fund-raisers, hold
exhibitions and photgraph shows. We speak at functions,
meetings, schools, churches and Colleges. We also address Rotary
and Lions Clubs etc. We have regular newsletters and are in
touch all the time with the India SKCV Management and children
through email, phone, fax and more recently Internet Chat.
SKCV
has nine trustees who work voluntarily throughout the UK to
raise money and gifts. The trustees come from all walks of life
from commerce and industry to medicine, of life from commerce
and industry, to medicine, finance and the media. Most of
themselves, having visited the charity projects in India at
least once and received the unforgettable welcome extended to
all visitors.
The
Founder resides with his family in India at the Children's
Village.
Dr
and Mrs. Norton and the trustees are supported by a growing band
of volunteers up and down the country on whose fund-raising
efforts SKCV depends in order to feed, clothe and educate its
ever-expanding family. Fund-raising events cover a wide spectrum
from traditional "coffee mornings" and "bring and
buy" sales to a charity screening in Manchester of the film
‘City of Joy’ hosted by Art Malik who co-starred in this
moving film about the Calcutta slum with Patrick Swayze and
Pauline Collins. Malik, best known for his role as Hari Kumar in
‘Jewel in the Crown ‘ later went on to make ‘True Lies’
With Arnold Schwarzenegger.
All
this has been made possible by public donations both in the UK
and India.
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A
TYPICAL STREET CHILD* IN INDIA
*
The typical street child may be a boy or a girl, but for the
sake of brevity we use the term "he" here
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He
around 12 years old from a large family in a disadvantaged,
rural area. None of the adults in his family has a job and
he is the butt of constant abuse and neglect that finally
drives him away from home.
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He
drops out of school and works in small cafes or picks rags
for sale or begs to support himself, earning a meager 10 to
75 pence a day. With nowhere safe to keep his earnings, they
are often stolen along with the few possessions he may own.
Yet in spite of the harsh, often brutal conditions on the
street, he finds them preferable to life in an institution.
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Because
he has no regular medical attention or nutritious food, he
is constantly sick and weak. He sees his family rarely, but
would love to return home it life were different for him
there.
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He
is the victim of abuse on the streets, both from the general
public who scorn him and the police. In his despair, he
turns to drugs or glue sniffing and his health deteriorates
rapidly. He is at risk from HIV and Aids, yet does not fully
understand the dangers.
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He
harbors a deep mistrust of adults and craves love, security
and happiness.
The
UN
Convention on the Rights of the Child
requires participating countries to take every measure to help
abused, neglected and needy children. India has ratified this
Convention and it's Constitution states that all children have
the right to security, basic nutrition, health and social
service.
But
much remains to be done. SKCV-UK aims to assist the Government
of India through SKCV-India to help as many children as
possible.
SKCV
strives to uphold and strengthen these rights, but we rely on
the generosity of the public to help us do this.
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NIGHT
SHELTERS & SECURE FACILITY
BOYS
SKCV
also runs a night shelter in Vijayawada for more than 100 homeless
boys, providing a safe, clean place to sleep, medical attention
and basic literacy and numeracy classes.
Those
who regularly attend the night shelter, known as Santhosh Bhavan,
for three months may then the village their permanent home, if
they so choose.
GIRLS
With
the help of a grant from The Railway Children (UK), SKCV has
recently opened a night shelter for vulnerable young girls in
Vijayawada which offers them a safe haven from the hazards of the
street. Life on the street for an abandoned or abused girl is
relatively short-lived - tragically the vast majority become
prostitutes either locally or in one of the bigger Indian cities.
Once lured into prostitution, they are seldom heard from again,
and many die of AIDS. There are 68 girls attending the centre at
present.
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A
FEW FACTS
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There
are more than 100 million street and working children, eking
out a grim existence in India towns and cities.
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Children
as young as six resort to car washing, begging, carrying
luggage, fetching tea or working in small industries to
support themselves.
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More
than 20% of India’s Gross National Produced by children.
Girls as young as nine are forced into prostitution in order
to survive.
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For more details visit SKCVs
website now
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OBITUARY,
THE GUARDIAN (UK) AUGUST 10, 2009
Matthew Norton, who became Sriman Manihara, dedicated his life to giving
India's street children a home and hope
My friend, Matthew Norton, was known as pataji
(father) by the thousands of children, some as young as five years old, that he
rescued from a miserable, disease-ridden existence on the streets of India.
He has died aged 56 after a fall at his home in Prema Vihar, the community
village for orphaned and abandoned boys that he set up 16 years ago with his
wife, Bhakti, in Vijayawada, south-east India.
Matthew was the founder in 1983 of Street Kids' Community Villages (SKCV), a
registered charity, and author of a manual for the care of street children, the
Child (Comprehensive Help for India's Little Destitutes) System, first published
in 1994. The manual drew on Matthew's own early experiences of life on the
streets of Manchester and London.
The son of Desmond Norton, a GP in Sale, and his physiotherapist wife,
Tricia, Matthew ran away at the age of 16 from his loving, comfortable family
home because of what he regarded as a repressive school education.
Lost years of drug-taking and squatting in empty houses followed, until he
joined the Hare Krishna sect, with which he travelled the world. He was 22 and
free of drugs when they arrived in India where, finally, he found his spiritual
home. Horrified by the conditions in which very young children were living, he
parted company with the sect and set up a small shelter for street kids in
Mumbai.
He changed his name to Sriman Manihara and his religion to Hinduism, and
became an Indian citizen. SKCV was founded in 1983 and 10 years later Matthew's
parents, who were fiercely proud of their once wayward son, set up its UK
fundraising arm.
For many railway station ragpickers, tea-shop workers and luggage carriers
earning a few pence a day, SKCV is not just a safe haven of nutritious food and
medical care, but also their first real home, free from beatings and abuse. Two
years ago, Matthew achieved his long-held ambition to open a second SKCV centre,
this time for girls, which was the first of its kind in the Andhra Pradesh
region.
A significant number of young people are accepted from the charity's
non-formal schools into mainstream education. Others go on to undertake
vocational training, while some have gained university degrees and returned to
SKCV to care for former street children like themselves. They now lead a
management group that undertakes the running of the charity. Their success is a
moving tribute to a man who dedicated 26 years of his life, the last 10 dogged
by ill-health, including osteoporosis, to giving street children a home and hope
for the future.
He is survived by Bhakti, and two sons, Mhadavar and Ananda, as well as his
mother Tricia, sisters Hillary and Lucy, and brother Gerard.
THE HINDU, JUNE 2009:
VIJAYAWADA: S. Manihara, a child rights activist, founder and managing
trustee of Sri Krishna Chaitanya Vidyavihara (SKCV) Children’s Trust, died in
a local hospital on Monday morning.
The condition of Mr. Manihara, who has been ailing for some time,
deteriorated on Sunday night when he lost consciousness. He was rushed to a
local hospital and was being treated in the intensive care unit of the hospital.
But the 56-year-old failed to respond to the treatment and died around 9 a.m. on
Monday. Doctors at the hospital said he had succumbed to cerebral haemorrhage.
He is survived by wife Bhakthi Nidhi and two sons Madhava and Anandamoya.
Mr. Manihara had been ailing for the last six years. He suffered with
osteoporosis that became severe in the last three years and forced him to opt
for hip replacement. He also suffered with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) that had
restricted his movement.
Born in 1953, Manihara himself was a runaway child and had experienced the
pain and anguish of being left uncared for on streets. A native of Manchester in
England, he changed his name to Sriman Manihara from Matthew William Norton
after taking Indian citizenship.
He set up the SKCV Charitable Trust in the city in 1988 with an aim to
provide not just shelter but love and care to runaway kids who land on railway
platforms and streets, falling easy prey to addictions and vices at a very young
age. Giving shape to his dream, he then groomed Premavihar, a picturesque
village on the banks of the Krishna at Bhavanipuram.
Children rescued from various places are brought here and either sent to
school or the vocational training centre set up by the trust to impart
need-based training to the children.
The Trust also built a project at Kaza village in Guntur district exclusively
for rehabilitation of girls.
The body of the social worker will be cremated on Wednesday.
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