If you followed my last link you’ll have found yourself at Gems TV, currently calling themselves Gemporia. If you watch for a while you’ll find they are raising money to build schools in the parts of Africa where some of the gems come from that they buy from the miners. Long ago I did silversmithing and used to make jewellery. I didn’t intend to sell it but people kept asking where I got it and if I would make one for them, so I backed into a hobby business that lasted a few years in the early eighties. I stopped for two reasons. I became frustrated at not being able to shape the gems. I could shape the metal but I wanted to be able to shape the bits of rock too. Once I discovered kilns and porcelain I could turn the rock to mud and turn it back to rock in any shape I wanted. The other problem was tracking the origins of the gemstones. You can be involved in gemstones for a very short time before the utter unfairness of much of the industry grabs you. In few cases are the people who risk their lives going into the bowels of the earth to fetch the treasures the ones who benefit from them. Usually the miner and indigenous peoples get very little for their efforts; most of the profits go to bigger and bigger dealers whose effort sometimes consists of sitting in offices making telephone calls.
Gems TV has set up its own charity to help in mining areas and are currently raising money to build schools. I was struck by the comparison with the money it takes to care for my difficult, demented mother. £10,000 a month to care for her, £20,000 to build a school that will help many children for a long time.
I have another meeting with the financial expert tomorrow to finalise the arrangements for remortgaging her house. One of the problems with this is that I cannot find the title deeds of the house anywhere. Eventually I turned to the UK Land Registry. You can find them online at www.landregistryservices.com and from the website obtain proper documents to establish the ownership of land or a property. This is helpful. Talking to carers of other demented people, the piles of paper scenario seems to be quite common. If I were beginning being a carer with the knowledge I have now, I would take steps soon to secure essential documents in a location other than that of the demented person. Looking back I could have saved myself hours of anguish if I had redirected the post, so that my mother could not destroy or lose important letters and if I had put documents pertaining to insurance, ownership and so on in a safe place to begin with. I was, of course not helped by the executors of my father’s will taking loose piles of paper away for most of a year. These contained contact numbers and addresses for many insurances, annual fees and so on that needed paying or registering throughout the year. Whether the title deeds to the house were with them I shall never know unless they turn up somewhere else in the fullness of time.
If you need to establish ownership, in this case or any other, for example if your house burned down, or a disaster destroyed your documents or you just plain lost them, the land registry is the place to go. I had difficulty registering initially, I hadn’t clicked on something and it seemed to take overnight for the email to arrive at my inbox. Once it had I was up and running. For a fee of £25 I can print off the document as many times as I need within a time period, so there is a copy for the mortgage lenders that they can keep, a copy for my mother’s solicitors and one for me.
Meanwhile my mother is having a whiny aggressive phase. I checked with the agency office; it isn’t just me, that’s how she is at present. Oven gloves have been a problem. She wanted new ones and asked everyone with the result that, after weeks of complaining she doesn’t have oven gloves, she now has two lots, both wrong. I had a lovely half hour of oven gloves on the phone, in between the half hour about her dizziness and the general half hour of complaint. You end the phone call feeling emotionally battered. I couldn’t help thinking about some families in Tanzania who don’t even have ovens, let alone oven gloves.
If you want to redress the balance get yourself along to Gems TV and help to give a good start to children who have nothing, it makes a great change from me giving everything to a miserable old lady who had had everything her whole life and still isn’t satisfied.
www.gemporia.com click on ‘about us’ top left and scroll down.
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JaneLaverick.com – about the earth and who owns it.