Issue Nº335-336 – In Memoriam

Siegfried Latzke, a German national who came to Auroville in 1998, left his body on 22nd April, surrounded by his family. He had been diagnosed with cancer four weeks earlier. He was 70 years old.

For the first seven years, Siegfried worked in the Bommaiyur Toy Carpentry unit, living in Alankuppam village. Afterwards he started a jam making unit.

Siegfried’s remains were cremated at the Adventure Burial and Cremation grounds on Wednesday, April 26th.

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.

On April 26th, Anne Nunnally (called ‘Anie’ by The Mother), a dear friend of Auroville, passed away at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram Nursing Home at the age of 80.

Anie, who was a professional singer and musician, first came to Pondicherry in 1968 with her husband Narad. She lived in the Ashram for several years before returning to the USA, from where she maintained an intense correspondence with The Mother and supported the Ashram and Auroville in many ways. She was active in the Matagiri Sri Aurobindo Center in Woodstock, served as the first board member of the Foundation for World Education (FWE) and was from 2009-2015 President of the Board of the East/West Cultural Centre (EWCC) in Los Angeles.

In 1999, Anie interviewed 12 disciples who had been close to The Mother. These interviews, which give a glimpse of how lives were transformed by the action of Sri Aurobindo and The Mother, were later published in the book ‘The Golden Path’.

In February 2016, Anie came back home to Pondicherry, along with her Aurovilian friend Mikael Spector. She intended to work on a follow-up volume but could not do so because of a kidney failure followed by a series of strokes.

Friends from the US and France contributed to a fund for her hospital stay and dialysis supplies; eventually she was taken up in Dr Dutta’s Nursing Home. Anie’s body was cremated on April 27th in the Ashram’s cremation grounds. A retrospective album of photos is online at https://goo.gl/photos/Z9aAtm6Jn2udMQBr9.