Sewa Week 2011

As part of Sewa Week, over 600 people attended free health and well being workshops. The Sewa Week Team joined forces with Univ. Of Manchester Olympic Health Team, Univ. Of East London and Redbridge Mayor’s Charity Committee to make it an even bigger Sewa Week than ever before.

The Sewa Week, or making a difference week through self less work, has been a great success in East London. Prof. Raj Bhandari from Manchester Univ said: “A lot of people walk around not knowing they are suffering from conditions such as high blood pressure, diabetes and high cholesterol. Cholesterol and high blood pressure readings remain as high as they did 3 years ago when we last did tests. However high blood sugar has come down to 10% of the people tested.

This shows that people are either taking medication that is controlling their blood glucose levels or people are enjoying better health.  Almost 1 in 5 are still obese however.  It may well be that this is because glucose tests are more easily available now then ever before compared to cholesterol testing. “

We are grateful to the Mayor of Redbridge for making the Town Hall available for this very useful job. All donations went to his charity.

Sewa week started 10 years ago in Ilford and its popularity developed from here to several towns over the years. Last year this developed to National Sewa Day where 5000 people, young and old and of all backgrounds took part. This year the day developed further into International Sewa Day and people in 20 countries took part in the event.

Sewa week is all inclusive and it was great to see people from the Redbridge Assessment Centre (formerly Redbridge Night Shelter) take part in washing cars to help their Centre as well as people from all faiths get together to cook serve and provide entertainment for the these residents.