Matters India Reporter
Siliguri, November 9, 2024: A newly inaugurated curia centre of Bagdogra diocese in Siliguri, serves health and wellness of local tea workers. The facility was blessed on November 9 by Archbishop Vincent Aind of Ranchi.
“The building christined ‘Dishangan’ connotes direction, guidance, leading and nurturing; the kind of things which Jesus who is the ‘way and the truth’ came to do,” says Vicar General of Bagdogra diocese Fr Felix Pinto.
Situated in Gulma area of Siliguri, the majority of the beneficiaries of the new facility are tea labourers surviving on meagre income from neighbouring tea gardens.
“The focus of this centre is to improve the mental health of the community and to promote naturopathy, treatment with less of allopathy medicine and using more of traditional and non-intrusive health remedies,” adds Pinto.
Through the Health & Counseling Centre housed in Dishangan, Fr. Anthres Toppo and Fr. Michael Kerketta are already giving counseling and reflexology treatment.
Besides Health and Counseling centre, the facility will also serve as the diocesan curia and offices for different diocesan commissions.
It was the vision of former bishop of Bagdogra Vincent Aind currently archbishop of Ranchi on the occasion of the silver jubilee of the diocese, to have a multipurpose facility that would cater both to the social and religious needs of the diocese.
Though the construction of the health and wellness centre began in 2020 at the beginning of the second wave of COVID-19, shortage of funds did not allow the completion of the facility prior to the Jubilee in 2022.
The diocese of Bagdogra in North Bengal bifurcated from Darjeeling diocese in June 1997 completed 25 years in 2022
A step in the right direction of organic growth with the community experience of wholeness central to the project. May the vision holistic health be carried forward with the new Bishop at the helm.