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Nazareth House

Location	Cape Town and Johannesburg
Field	Caring for children and aged
Director	Rosie Whittaker
Website	www.nazhouse.org.za

For the past 126 years Nazareth House, one of the oldest organisations, has taken care of indigent elderly and orphaned and abandoned children, or children with incurable diseases. The Sisters arrived in Cape Town in 1881, at the request of the then Bishop of Cape Town. In total, more than 100 underprivileged children and adults are sheltered, fed, medicated and counselled at any given time. This equates to 110 000 meals served or 36 500 beds that have been occupied for the night!

Caring for the Aged
For a frail elderly person without family or finances, life is becoming increasingly difficult. Families do not have the necessary information, education, skills and facilities to deal with issues such as Dementia, Alzheimer’s, physical frailties and various other debilitating physical and mental diseases that affect the elderly. There are limited facilities available that offer the care and treatment that these elderly folk require.

Those that derive the most benefit from organisations like Nazareth House are mostly incapacitated, aged indigent pensioners who come from situations of neglect in impoverished areas. Their only income is their government pension.

The elderly are cared for at the House in Vredehoek and also at the House in Elsies River.

Caring for the Children
Legend has it that the first child that the Sisters cared for ‘had a head like a fish’, otherwise known as Microcephalitus. While we do not take this literally, we acknowledge that the philosophy of caring for those shunned by society still remains in place today – it is the circumstances that surround this philosophy that has changed.

The need to expand the range of care for babies and children came to light in 1992, when no-one else would take in an HIV positive baby (let alone one of colour!), probably due to the lack of knowledge and education surrounding HIV. Nazareth House’s first HIV positive baby was admitted in 1992 and he remains with them today.

In an effort to provide non-institutional care, two community cottages were opened where the ‘healthier’ HIV infected children live positively within a community environment. They attend the local mainstream schools and interact socially with their peers. Something stigma has not allowed them to do in the past. The more vulnerable and special needs children remain at the main House in Vredehoek and will remain there for the rest of their lives.

Nazareth House has found that there is a desperate need for care of temporary or emergency placed children in a Place of Safety. They are finding that the numbers of these children, whose admissions are received through the Child Protection Services and the South African Police Services, have increased dramatically and expect the numbers to increase even more over the next few years. These children, who have been abused, neglected or abandoned, stay at Nazareth House for their protection. Their stay can be anything from two days to two months, while the Child Protection Services looks for alternate long term placement for them.

St Michael’s Hospice and Palliative Care Unit
In 2003, Nazareth House found the need to expand their HIV care to adults as well as children and so St Michael’s Hospice and Palliative Care Unit was born. A year ago, due to increased demands on their service, the hospice moved from the main building to another on the premises and can now accommodate 14 patients at any given time – twice as many as before.

Because of lack of resources and the huge demand for bed space, the local hospitals can only accommodate these patients at most for 4 – 5 days at a time. Nazareth House is one of very few facilities to offer medium term placement for introduction and stabilisation of ARV treatment. Without facilities such as St Michael’s, these patients would be discharged home prematurely and as most of the patients are homeless, they would die on the streets.

St Michael’s not only gives palliative care, but also terminal care to those too sick or unable to go on Anti-Retroviral treatment. The programme at Nazareth House is aimed to ‘holds their hands’ for the first 6 – 8 weeks when side effects are most likely to present themselves.

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Good works are links that form a chain of life.
Mother Teresa

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