My mother, Trisha Silvester, who has died aged 79, was a single mother, businesswoman and long-serving charity chair, whose talent for connecting people helped change the lives of mothers and children in rural Bangladesh.
As a young mother in the 1970s, she watched a television programme about Sandra Simpson, a Canadian woman who had established orphanages in Vietnam and Bangladesh. Trisha then met Sandra and travelled with her in 1977 to Dhaka, where Sandra had set up her orphanage in a large house in the city. This visit was to change the course of Trisha’s life. That year she started a charity, Families for Children (UK), to raise funds to support the project.
