Annapoorna Yathra
We Started in order to provide the basic need of good food to the mentally ill people living on the roadsides of Kanyakumari and Rameswaram district.
The program now has evolved into a mobile service, providing nutritious lunch to 300 people daily and treatment for minor ailments such as colds, fever, wounds and skin diseases. On a weekly basis, they receive a shave, haircuts and nail trims.
Our Programs
Life Skills Training to help participants de-rust their everyday sensibilities and get comfortable once more in doing routine activities.
- Cognitive Therapy :- activities like simple accounting, measurements, the use of language etc. – designed to brush up basic intellectual abilities that are needed regularly in everyday life.
- Creative Therapy :- art, music, theatre and other forms of creative/performative activities that nurture back to life dormant imaginative faculties and constructively channelize emotional release.
- Recreation and Relaxation Therapy :- through sports, parody, mimicry sessions, feasts, outings and other fun and game items that most of us take for granted in everyday life, but institutionalized mental patients hardly get a taste of.
- Occupational Therapy :- training in vocational skills like sewing, incense-stick making, block printing, stationery production, gardening – items carefully planned to help patients with greater coordination of motor and brain functions, simultaneously helping them with skills that would help in earning.
- Psychotherapy :- group and Individual counseling to address specific needs of particular patients and improved group behaviour.
- Economic Empowerment :- selling products made by clients, the proceeds poured back into the programme, and helping reintegrated patients with employment opportunities.
- Organizing Shelter :- like short-stay homes, old age homes for reintegration-ready patients with no families to go back to/abusive families/destitute families .
- Reconnecting with the Real World :- through human contact and interface with the world outside the hospital walls, through inviting visitors/ popular icons like rock stars or matinee idols to attend MANOLAYA meetings, organizing outings and tea-parties in the houses of MANOLAYA’S friends and patrons, distributing newspapers and journals etc.
