Our Hospice

Brighter Future has a Hospice at Shanti Nivas.

It was built at the same time as the children's home  and was funded by the Pickford Memorial Trust. David Pickford was a long time friend of our then Chairman, Danny Parisipogula. David was a trustee of BFIT for many years. The Hospice was built and funded by his family. as a memorial to David. It  opened in August 2012.

The need for a hospice, where mothers and children could be admitted together to avoid separation, was apparent as the other only centre was up to  a hundred kilometres from our area of opperation. Run by Rotary they only admitted patients for two or three days and would not take children.

The aim of our Hospice is to offer nursing care to HIV/AIDS patients during the acute phases of their illness, to offer support during the periods when patients need to adapt to the severity of starting ART treatment and to offer palliative care for the terminally ill. The dying have often been abandoned by relatives and are homeless. Their alterative can be  to die on the streets.

 Many of our severely ill patients are suffering from co-infection with TB. They may have been only recently diagnosed as having HIV AIDS. The HIV virus goes through 5 recognisable stages until it reaches its terminal AIDS phase.Patients suffer fevers and body pains, weakness, nausea and diarrhoea, especially if they are protein defficient. 

 Malnutrition is endemic among people whose main diet is rice served with only vegetable flavoured water called rasam.Fresh and green vegetables are rarely affordable and if available are cooked for a long time which destroys the vitamin content. Lentils, the main source of protein among traditionally vegetarian people, are very expensive and watered down to go further..

The patients need building up with vitamins and a protein rich diet if they are to tolerate and respond to the anti-retroviral drugs.Our food and drugs bill is therefore naturally large!. 

We have one or two supporters in the UK who contribute £10 a month towards the care of a hospice patient and would dearly like to find more!  
We need to find  funding  or grants.Until recently had some help. from the Right Now Foundation.( who are child orientated). However the numbers of children admitted was declining and the adult admissions increased.  The grant ceased in March 2015. 

To attract a nurse and doctor to work with HIV infected people is difficult and expensive. There is stigma attached to even working with HIV/AIDS patients. 
We have a very good nurse who is experienced in caring for HIV patients and are we are shortly to have a well qualified doctor who will visit the hospice twice a week and be on call at all times.

Over the years I have sent proposals to all the main HIV/AIDS charities. they say carry on with the good work  but they have a policy of not accepting un-solicited proposals and also  like to give to government departments. They want to have large numbers of beneficieries and are not interested in small genuine grass roots organisations like ours. 

We need to find several small trusts able to give grants of a £1000 or more. 

If you have any contacts do let me (pmanya.norris@gmail.com) or Brighter Future International Trust (brighterfuturefriends@gmail.com) know.

To give you some idea of the cost of running the hospice the nurse’s salary is £720 pa., the cleaner and helper £360 each. Medicines vitamins and supplements cost £5000pa and food, electricity and transport account for another £4000pa.We need to find several small trusts able to  give small grants of a £1000 or more.

This year five children have died among loving friends and carers. 
Brighter Future has also paid for them to be transported to their home villages and cremated according to the local custom.