Our newest and biggest shelter home is our Mandawar Gurukul. Our Vice President, Jas Kalra is solely responsible for the birth of our Mandwar shelter. He noticed that the number of rescues and residents arriving daily to our Bandhwari shelter was increasing rapidly. Due to a lack of space and staff, these new residents were unable to get proper access to our facilities, medical staff, caretakers, accomodation, and much more. Our VP, instead of reducing the quality of life of our Bandhwari Gurukul’s residents, tackled this issue by initiating the construction of our Mandawar Gurukul. Both gurukul’s are identical in terms of facilities, but Mandawar stands out in terms of its size and number of residents.
We have a wide variety of facilities at our Mandawar Gurukul, providing for more than 300 underprivileged people. With 2 floors each, there are about 11 sheds, equally divided amongst our men and women residents. Each shed consists of 2 dormitories, generating electricity from solar power panels and are able to accommodate about 60 people, which is double the amount of people when compared to our Bandhwari shelter sheds. Within each dormitory there is a wide variety of furniture such as, beds, mattresses, pillows, sofas, chairs, cabinets adjacent to each bed, etc.
There are ceiling fans, coolers, and windows in every dormitory to fight the intense summer heat and during winters, heaters, warmers and woolen blankets are provided to the residents. Each dormitory is attached with sanitised restrooms, which have a 24-hour supply of water and solar power. Every dormitory has an area designated for physiotherapy, where a team of our nurses and doctors use medical exercise equipment to treat the physically disabled and elderly. Indoor gymming equipment is available in all our dormitories and can be used by any of our residents.
The common area at our Mandawar Gurukul is much bigger and wider than Bandhwari, stretching across a wide area, it gives our residents a sense of peace and quiet. Besides this, our common area is a place where all the residents come together to interact, play outdoor sports and exercise. Our common area is solely responsible for building a feeling of family and community amongst the residents. Located behind our sheds and common area is our dog shelter, which consists of around 32 dogs. All dogs are provided with 3 nutritional meals a day, treats and snacks, toys to play with and individual sleeping sheds. Our dog shelter stretches over an enormous area to ensure our animals have enough space to freely play around and exercise daily.
Many physically disbaled and senior citizens residing in our shelter require constant medical care and attention. Our mandawar shelter thus consists of a medical centre, which provides our residents with all kinds of essential and necessary medical facilities. Our dedicated rescue and transport team escorts many residents to and from hospitals and medical centres and at the same time save all our rescues from horrible living conditions, as most of them are homeless and abandoned. Besides this, we have a fully functional and regularly santisied treatment centre, with all the necessary medical equipment and a trained group of medical professionals and nurses, providing physical treatment and care to all our rescues and residents. Our medical centre consists of a wide range of medical facilities and services such as, providing medicines, (both allopathic and homeopathic), physiotherapy, routine checkups, bandaging, sponge baths and much more.
The pandemic has taught us that being locked up inside and interacting with the same people everyday, can make life extremely monotonous and dull. Life in a shelter home, where the residents see and interact with the same people everyday, go for regular medical checkups and eat 3 routinely timed meals a day, all this can get extremely tedious and boring. To tackle this issue and ensure that our residents stay happy and satisfied, we have always provided them access to different ways they can keep themselves entertained. Our residents have access to newspapers, books, television, radio, music, etc. To maintain a sense of peace and tranquility, holy songs and prayers are played on loudspeakers, from 7-10pm, daily. In order to ensure our residents’ physical and mental stimulation, they engage in various board and card games and various outdoor sports. Before Covid, our residents were sent with an ID card on many outings, such as, a pilgrimage trip to Haridwar, Aravalli biodiversity park, movies and hotels. Cultural programs and all kinds of festivals are often celebrated at our shelters. On a resident's birthday they are provided with all their favorite meals and snacks.
Our Mandawar Village shelter will soon become the home for nearly 2,000-5,000 abandoned senior citizens and disabled people. Making it the world's largest charitable shelter home for the underprivileged. This shelter home will be our biggest accomplishment, allowing us to cater to and serve a larger and diverse community of socially, mentally, emotionally, and physically disadvantaged persons.
