21 Thursday Jun 2012
Posted in Articles & Reports
13 Wednesday Jun 2012
Posted in Press Releases
Suva’s best-known retirement residence, the Pearce Home, now welcomes long and short-term stayers.
And if you’ve business or other matters to attend to in the capital for a day or two, or three, inexpensive accommodation and meals are available.
The Home also offers respite stays. Those without home help may wish to leave an older family member in the good hands of Home staff while they attend to business or run important errands in town.
The Pearce Home is a secure, well-maintained oasis on Butt Street beside its long-time neighbour, The Fiji Times. It has retained much of its colonial design and charm and is managed and run by friendly, qualified staff. Facilities include a common dining room and spacious lounge area with television, piano, library and other recreational activities.
The Home is an easy walk, or a short cab ride to shops, restaurants, clubs, pharmacies, doctors, hospitals, supermarkets, places of worship, government buildings and the city’s central business district. Bus stops and taxi stands are close by.
Rooms are well appointed and serviced daily. Meals, including morning and afternoon tea, are wholesome and inclusive of board rates.
Daily: F$50.00 all inclusive (accommodation, meals, laundry service etc)
Monthly: F$900.00 all inclusive (accommodation, meals, laundry service, power, water etc)
The Pearce Home is operated by the Suva Relief Fund Trust under the direction of a Board of Trustees. For information/reservations contact Resident Manager, Matron Ruci Kava (Tel: 679 3302396, M: 9765485), Trust Secretary Reubina Ram, 3304871, 9939799, E: reubina_ram@yahoo.com, or Trustee Emelita Wilson, 3300288, 9496332, emelita.wilson@gmail.com.
08 Friday Jun 2012
Posted in Articles & Reports, Health Hints
Greetings grey-power-people! Here is an excerpt from the book Avoid Retirement and Stay Alive, by David Bogan & Keith Davies, published by Harper Collins in 2007 and reprinted twice during that year.
‘…since you were born you’ve been marking time before you enter the dock for society to pronounce sentence: You have been found guilty of working hard all your life. You will now pay for that. You are sentenced to live out the rest of your days in a truly worthless existence. We’ll find you a little box to call home, where you will be expected to do less and eat less. And if you get sick we’ll soak up any savings you might have then put you at the back of the queue, behind all the other old and worthless people’.
Bogan and Davies want us to remove the word ‘retirement’ from our vocabulary. As the blurb on the cover claims: ‘Retirement is a dumb idea with no place in modern society. It’s absurd, and economically unviable’.
This book imparts a history of retirement. It explains how ‘retirement’ came to be ‘invented’ and explains the great ‘retirement fund scam’. It tells us why our private retirement fund was never going to be any more viable than a government pension. Globally, retirement is no longer sustainable. We ‘discarded persons’ can no longer rely on governments, pension schemes and subsidised health care to help us out. And this situation will not improve, it will get worse.
As the writers point out – it’s the people who can afford to retire that don’t; and the ones who cannot afford to who do. The likes of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett don’t retire. They don’t because they choose to keep going. And that’s the point – if we work for somebody else we are usually forced to retire at a given age. And that is ruining the world’s economy.
The book tells us about the many companies, over 80 in the UK including B&Q, Sainsbury’s and Kappa Packaging that now have a policy of employing a large percentage of people aged 50 and above. Why? Because they turn up on time, they are interested in their job, they have years of valuable experience, they have better customer relation skills, they take fewer sick days off, and they don’t steal from their employers. Interesting, isn’t it?
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04 Monday Jun 2012
What is it about climate change that has people at each others’ throats as soon as the subject crops up? It’s up there with religion and politics as a conversation no-no – a ‘don’t go there’ topic. And what gets my goat is the fact, and it is a fact, that the doom-sayers are winning the argument – to the detriment of children everywhere.
On the one hand we have the ‘there is no such thing as climate change’ fundamentalists: and on the other we have the ‘human beings are causing climate change’ fundamentalists; with neither camp prepared to grant that there has always been climate change, and there always will be climate change, and the truly big unanswered question is ‘just how much are human beings exacerbating climate change’ for the worse. We don’t know. We are simply being told by vested interests that it is all our fault.
I watched a BBC interviewer ask children in a New York school about climate change, and my heart went out to those kids, aged around 5 or 6. They actually believed that the world was about to end – that we would all die for lack of food – that there would soon be no animals left on the planet. They all agreed that they were scared of climate change. One little girl said her mother was ‘very scared’; indeed several mentioned their parents’ fear. Then there was the TV report about a little girl who dashed home from school, burst into her apartment and ran madly from room to room closing every window, yelling to her mother that ‘the air is going to poison us.
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