In memoriam - Paulien Zuidervaart

On April 25th, Paulien of Vikas passed away in the Intensive Care Unit of the East Coast Hospital in the presence of her sister Mariette and her friend Betty. She had been suffering from cancer and was 64 years old.

Paulien, a Dutch national, had lived in Findhorn for seven years before joining Auroville in 1998. In her first years in Auroville, she was involved in forming a kind of job-service for the then Entry Group and also worked for an ecological project. In 2005, she found her ‘swadharma’ working with children through the ‘sand box’ medium, a practice which she refined over the years. After serving at the Nandanam Kindergarten for several years, she moved to Transition Primary School, where she specifically worked on a one-to-one basis with children who needed special attention, using the sand box as one of her tools. She also became one of the founding members of The Learning Community (TLC) and participated in the TLC Pitchandikulam team, facilitating afternoons of forest exploration with the younger children of TLC.

Paulien’s body was cremated at the Adventure Burial and Cremation grounds on April 28th. It was a very beautiful, very Aurovilian event in the late golden hours of the afternoon, with her colleagues of the Auroville Choir singing the Earth Aspiration song before and during the ignition of the fire. Also the TLC children were present and sang in her memory.