Personal Addendum
Dear members, benefactors
and friends of the Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard,
The past year 2009 was a major challenge for all of us in many different ways:
Our organisation has not just grown and developed slowly, but exploded. When you
look at our statistics with growth rates of up to 30% only within this year
2009, our personnel development to a total number of 84 employees one may think
we are not just moving like in car, but speeding in a fighter plane or rocket.
The fight against AIDS at a renown hotspot of this pandemic just does not allow
us to sit back in complacency and pride about what we have achieved, but we must
move forward and do this strategically, rationally, energetically and with our
full hearts. Without our hearts we would never have come as far as we have and
could never carry on at this pace.
Although all our 84 staff members are good, many very good, and some excellent I
have to mention just two staff members who have deserved a special portion of
the accolades of praise that are due to all our staff members and hoards of
volunteers. These are in order of length of service our medical doctor, Dr.
Khaya Nzimande, and our General Manager Mr. Axel Pape. Dr. Nzimande is not just
an excellent medical doctor with a profound medical knowledge and permanent aim
to update his skills, but very special personality who comes over to his
patients like a brother they can trust in, who has understanding and endless
patience and on top of it a very refreshing sense of humour and a twinkle of
encouragement in his eyes. Our patients adore him and I am sure that all of this
is a major reason for the great success of our hospice and its very high
occupancy rate and reputation. A kind of "treatment tourism" has developed where
people move their residence from far away into our vicinity and a few days later
ask for admission into our Hospice and antiretroviral treatment programme. Today
our Bishop asked me if we could not admit a relative of another bishop from far
away because he heard how well we treat our patients. My gratitude, of course,
is due to our entire staff who have all contributed to achieve that fame. Great
praise is due to our Home Care Team which made a major development , our
Residential Care Team which keeps up with the high pace optimum occupancy
demands, our training programme, where Sr. Biyela faithfully prepares a
continuous flow of newly trained home carers for their families, communities and
as volunteers in our Hospice and last but not least to our HAART team, our
special task force which is so highly efficient that even Harry Hine, a student
social worker from Germany, came to us to write his dissertation for his
masters' degree to find out which social, geographic and other factors influence
the efficiency of the AIDS treatment. I am especially proud that last years plan
to implement support groups for AIDS patients on HAART have not just been put
into action, but superseded by the start of sustainable food supply programmes
(community gardens) and income generation programmes like basket making, fruit
plantations, chicken farming and individual gardening. Our Therapeutic
Counsellor Wiseman Zulu has played an outstanding initiative and role in that,
which is absolutely admirable!
The second major reason for my pride and gratitude are the achievements of our
General Manager, Mr. Axel Pape, who has been with us for just over one year.
With an engineer's mind for decisiveness and precision and an absolutely
unmatched amount of diligence, perseverance and well aimed deployment of his
energy, Mr. Pape, who was General Manager of a large factory before has adapted
to the situation of a very unique and special organisation and has not only kept
this huge and divers Care Centre running, but achieved major further
developments, especially by spearheading the process towards full accreditation
of our Hospice by the Council for Health Services Accreditation of South Africa.
Phase one has been successfully completed and the phase two assessment is due
early in 2010 and I dream to be able to announce our full accreditation in our
next newsletter. Mr. Pape's capabilities were most successfully put to the test
when I went onto extended home leave this year from April to July and he
manoeuvred our Care Centre most successfully on his own through all the stormy
waters.
That enabled me to cut the umbilical cord of the Care Centre Management finally
and trust in the intuition of the grown up structure and it works perfectly. I
am still close at hand, when advice is needed (mostly through e-mail and a
weekly meeting just with the general manager) and have become totally free for
my very essential tasks of public relations and foreign fundraising and of
course as head of the board of directors. My role as the "Father" of all the
children in our Children's Home will also always remain a task which I cannot
and will not abdicate for reasons of the emotional security of our 41 children
at the ages between 2 and 17. It is more than ten years since Gérard, the first
child, whose arrival initiated the development of our children's home, came to
us. My fatherly presence is very remote through the security that the children
can always approach me when they need a daddy's shoulder to cry onto, and my
Saturday afternoons spent with the older children through jointly shopping for
supper, and then cooking together, celebrating Holy Mass as a small group of
these 8 older children (youths) with our Sisters' Convent in my little chapel
next to the office and then having supper together in my lounge. Sundays I
usually take each Sunday a different room of the younger children for an outing.
We leave after Holy Mass, go to some nice place, make a picnic lunch and then
see what activities or attraction the chosen destination has to offer. If we
come back "too early" there is always a video or DVD in Father's lounge to watch
to ensure the kids get out of the quality time with Father as much as possible.
The fact that my role there can be reduced to these activities is possible
through our Children's Home Team under the leadership of Principal Mr. Victor
Himunchul and all the child care staff (including Vice-Principal Ntombi
Ndlangamandla, Sr. Edith Zulu, Mrs. Mthiyane as qualified child care workers or
teachers). Mr. Himunchul had the very difficult task to take over from Susanne
Stauffer who had been adored by her children. We are most grateful to him that
he started to reorganise the entire children's home to meet all the needs
of the South African Child Care Act in all procedural, hygienic, educational,
pedagogical and legal aspects and one ever has to wonder how a natural
family "get away" with all of that through "common sense". Congratulations to
Mr. Himunchul and his team that he mastered the achievement of getting through
the very critical scrutiny of of the Welfare Department in this past year 2009
with flying colours. Little later the Health Inspector certified our Home as
fully complying with all applicable regulations and recommended that our
capacity from officially 40 places may be increased to 55 places now since we
have added the wing for the older children already last year.
I look very confidently into the future. My only real and great worry is the
financial burden that such an institution - highly professionalized to meet the
demands of the various accreditation schedules - put onto our organisation. Our
running cost has risen tremendously, but the investment is justified, because
the higher professional standard finally translates into a better treatment of
our patients and a better education of our children. Therefore we have to open
up new avenues and every reasonable source to get the funds needed to keep going
and developing further in a sustainable manner. We have engaged into quite some
online fund-raising ventures using social networking channels like Facebook,
XING, Linked in, and others. Future will show if our investment of much time and
effort will finally proof itself worthwhile. We avoid too frequent printed
circular letters (hence this is an annual newsletter). Therefore this letter is
always a bit voluminous, but thank to Stanger Weekly, a local newspaper, and its
owner Mr. Ouderaj, who sponsors the printing of our newsletter in their
newspaper printing press it looks like a newspaper, but costs us nothing but the
fuel for the car to collect the printed newsletters free of charge from their
premises.
We have intensified our online correspondence, including online circulars, like
recently on Wold AIDS Day. We try to keep our website updated regularly and make
daily postings on Facebook.
Our long term strategic goal must become to increase the proportion of local
South African donations for sustainability reasons, but at the same time utilise
every reasonable avenue to get all the support that we continuously need.
Therefore allow me to appeal to you again:
Help us to help!
Yours sincerely
Father Gérard
This page is part of the Newsletter No. 29
of the Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard
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Gérard
This page was last updated on
Tuesday, 15 January 2013 12:49:48