Sheila Hurton describes some successes of the hospice:

A major success of the service is: beginning to get the message across. The staff are now very much respected by other health care institutions in their part of the country.

Gabriel is a man with enormous knowledge and he’s now acquiring skills in proposal writing which he is already passing on to others seeking funding. He has the respect of the director general of Ministry of Health and Sanitation, who has been to the hospice several times. Gabriel broadcasts regularly and we did a television broadcast while we were there last year, talking about palliative care and how beneficial it is, how cheap it is, how important it is; and they’re beginning to get their volunteers to encourage people in the community to go and have the test if they feel that that person may be HIV positive.

There’s a huge message to get across, but the hospice is succeeding - like a phoenix which has risen from the ashes of the most awful trauma that you could imagine; but they have the vision, they have the respect of local people. They also have the Women’s Wellness project – a project to get women off the streets to stop them spreading HIV/ AIDS. It was an 11- year civil war in which the rebels destroyed schools, hospitals, clinics, churches, whole villages, so some of these girls, who are now mums, never went to school.

The hospice has legal responsibility for about 67 orphans and vulnerable children and receives some international grants to pay for their school fees for a year, two sets of school uniform and some books and pencils. The children either live with foster parents or at home if they still have a parent who’s living but dying of HIV/AIDS, but the hospice undertakes to look after them for a year and then tries to place them with a foster parent or in an orphanage; and we’ve seen one of the orphanages which was really impressive.²²