A 96-year-old Westmeath Residential & Nursing Home resident is proving you?re never too old to make a difference, by crocheting afghans for needy children in India.

Muriel Gauntlett works on the afghans with her daughter Janet Percy who crochets teddy bears for the same project.

The crocheted items are part of a charitable endeavour organised locally by Bermudian Diane Kirwin who lives in California.

She is part of an organisation called Privilege-Sharing which collects funds for people in an impoverished village in Bihar, Northern India. Recently, Privilege-Sharing built a free school and they are now raising money to help children there to receive much needed medical care.

Because many people are malnourished in the village the rate of physical deformities is very high. Children who undergo surgery for medical conditions such as cleft palate and club feet receive a teddy bear made by Mrs. Percy, an artist who lives in St. David?s.

?Diane Kirwin is doing such wonderful work and what we do is just a tiny part of it,? said Mrs. Percy.

Mrs. Gauntlett?s afghans also go to children in the same village, because it can be very cold in this part of India. So far she has made seven afghans and her daughter has made 21 teddy bears for children recovering from surgery.

It is very much a mother-daughter project.

?My daughter Janet picks the colours out, from White & Sons Ltd in Warwick,? said Mrs. Gauntlett. ?Whites has the double knitting wool that we like.?

Mrs. Percy creates her teddy bears from wool left over by her mother?s afghans.

?I used to make the teddy bears all very plain,? Mrs. Percy said. ?Now I put stripes in the sweater to make them a bit more colourful. They all have a little smiley face. They are fun to make. Whoever is getting one, that is probably their only toy.?

Mrs. Percy said the bears are washable, but unfortunately where they are going, most people probably don?t have an electric washer. ?I think they could get pretty grubby,? she said. ?Their dwellings are pretty basic with a dirt floor.?

But she said she hoped that others might also consider making the bears for Privilege-Sharing.

?The bears are made from a universal pattern that is used by people all over the world making bears for needy children,? she said. ?Last year when Diane was here for a fund-raising trip she showed me the pattern and asked if I would be interested in making some. Diane and I went to the Bermuda High School together.?

Mrs. Percy not only agreed to make the teddies, but got her mother involved, because Mrs. Gauntlett is a seasoned crocheter. On her bed at Westmeath are a bedspread and pillows made she made.

Unfortunately, as a nonagenarian, crocheting an afghan is not as easy as it once was. ?I can?t do it without special glasses that have magnifying lenses,? said Mrs. Gauntlett. ?I also have another magnifying glass that I use all the time.

?Every little bit I have to examine to make sure I have done it properly, but I have been doing it a long time, so I can do a lot of it by feel.?

They say that when someone does you a kindness, pass it on. In a way, this is exactly what Mrs. Gauntlett is doing. Last Christmas Mrs. Gauntlett received an afghan from the Bermuda Junior Service League.

?They concentrated on Westmeath residents,? said Mrs. Gauntlett. ?All the women here got one. This is a different wool from what I use. I expect that it knits up very easily rather than crochet.?

Mrs. Gauntlett said she has been crocheting since she was a young girl.

?A friend, Cora Hamilton, showed me how to do it,? she said. ?I told her I?d never be able to do that. She said ?oh yes you will?. She was very patient. My mother was anxious to do it.

?She used to do knitted ones. She?d knit the squares and sew them together. With the crochet I?d make small squares and sew them together, but I can?t do that anymore so I do it all in one.?

Mrs. Gauntlett was born in Oxford, England. She came to Bermuda just after the First World War, at the age of ten with her parents. Her father, Captain Aylward Edward Dingle, was a well known British writer who had moved the family to Staten Island, New York a few years before. ?We had to take the ferry to go to New York,? Mrs. Gauntlett recalled. ?My mother used to take me and my sister as a special treat.?

She said that after the bitter cold of New York, Bermuda was like paradise to her father.

?It was very cold during the war,? she said. ?We couldn?t get coal, and we were very cold there on Staten Island. My father said, we won?t have any more of this, we?ll go somewhere warm.

?He thought either Florida or Bermuda. I think he chose Bermuda because it was a British colony.?

Captain Dingle, using the penname Sinbad, wrote more than 40 books, including, ?A Modern Sinbad; an Autobiography?.

?There is all kinds of information about him on the internet,? said Mrs. Percy. ?We have been trying to get a complete collection of his books. I would say there is probably about forty books.

?Each one of the children has his or her collection of them and the grandchildren are collecting them. My daughter in California searches for them on the Internet. It is interesting because on the cover you see three and six pence and now you might find the same book for $150 dollars.?

Mrs. Percy said her grandfather was actually the first person to sail to Bermuda on his own, in 1918, not long before moving his family to the island.

The family hasn?t produced any more famous writers, but there is an artistic streak, as evidenced by the beauty of Mrs. Gauntlett?s afghans.

?I worked full-time my whole life,? said Mrs. Percy. ?In 2001 I retired and fell right into a nice art career. I have always been an artist and took part in exhibitions all my life.

?In the early years I did watercolours of plants and flowers and then took a long break from it. Now I am doing fish sculptures that are fun to do and have met with very good response.?

Mrs. Gauntlett has three daughters Janet, Judy and Betty and one son, Ted, and several grandchildren and great grandchildren.

@EDITRULE:

Anyone interested in donating double knitting wool to the project, or crocheting the bears or afghans, can telephone 297-1738.

To help Privilege-Sharing or to view a short tape of Diane Kirwin?s work in India, please contact Walter Cook at 236-5997 or Nancy Murphie at 236-5990 or deposit funds directly at the Bank of Bermuda into Diane Kirwin?s account 701-25-111.