Norma Latham never would have guessed that her rotis could raise thousands of dollars for charity.

She’d been making the flatbread since she was a child in her native Guyana.

Five years ago she learnt about the work Bermuda Overseas Missions was doing and wanted to help.

“I had a mortgage and a son to put through school and could only afford to give about $100,” she said. “I thought, the only thing I knew how to do was make roti.”

A lightbulb went off. Days later, she began cooking out of the kitchen at Christ Church, Warwick.

The 68-year-old has raised close to $10,000 annually for BOM in the years since.

The funds are used to send people on Habitat for Humanity building projects overseas.

“That first time, I made $1,700,” Ms Latham said. “Since then I have done it twice a year for BOM. I easily make $4,000 to $5,000 each time.”

The retired nurse travelled with the charity to help to build homes for families in India in 2012 and Malawi in May.

“I was the oldest one to go to Malawi,” she said. There is no age limit as long as you are physically able.

“There is always something for every age group to do. Even if you can’t climb the ladder you can get on the scaffolding.

“They wouldn’t let me get on the scaffolding this year, even though I was perfectly capable, but that was all right.”

Ms Latham’s grandmother was a midwife in Guyana. She delivered every baby within a 16-mile radius and was often called on to help with sheep and cattle.

In thanks, villagers would bring her gifts which she then passed on to others who needed them more.

“One day, I said to my grandmother, ‘why do you keep giving everything away’,” Ms Latham said. “She said, ‘because you get what you give’. She lived to be 103 years old.”

As a child she dreamed of becoming a midwife herself.

“I always loved caring for others,” she said. “I was the fifth of 11 children and I even helped take care of my younger brother after he was born. I was just 11 years old.”

She completed nursing training at West Middlesex University Hospital in England in 1965, and came to Bermuda to visit a friend.

She met Bermudian Winslow Latham on that visit. The two married and divorced but had one son, Nuri. Ms Latham worked at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital for 38 years until she retired in 2013.

“I liked caring and doing,” she said. “There is real satisfaction when you help someone and you see them getting better.

“Bermuda is so small but you recognise former patients on the street and they tell you how they are doing. I loved my job.”

Her mother, Betty Bangaroo, taught her how to cook as a young child.

“[She] would get us up early on holidays [to make] food,” Ms Latham said. “She would put it in baskets to give to the less fortunate. My mother was always helping people.”

Ms Latham also volunteered with former Bermuda plastic surgeon Christopher Johnson on medical projects in Ecuador and Burundi.

She still gets tears in her eyes when she talks about Burundi, where Dr Johnson worked with children with cleft palates.

“Conditions there were the worst I had ever witnessed,” she said. “It was terrible that we were not able to do everyone. It was a huge clinic. Every other kid, no exaggeration, had a cleft lip or a double cleft lip. They say it is genetic but I also think it is because of pollutants in the river that they fished from.”