Saturday, October 06, 2007

Clare volunteers to build South African hospice

A team of volunteers from County Clare is to travel to South Africa to help a missionary nun fulfil her dream of building a hospice for the impoverished community where she works.

The volunteers are to be divided into four teams of approximately fifty people who will spend a week in turn next January and February in Missionvale, where Clare-born Sr Ethel Normoyle from the Little Company of Mary, ministers.

Sr Normoyle oversees a charitable operation which caters for some 2,000 people a day at a food station which distributes bread and protein supplements.

Her latest ambition is to build the badly-needed hospice, for which the foundations have already been laid.

The aim of the volunteer team is to complete the 100,000 foot building in six weeks.

A staggering 70 per cent of the 140,000 people in Missionvale have HIV and the hospice aims to cater for them and their families.

One of the team leaders, Olive Halpin, has already spent six months working with Sr Normoyle as a volunteer.

She said conditions in the town were “awful” with “poverty, devastation and death all around.”

Ms Halpin said she hoped to have assembled the volunteers shortly but still required blocklayers and people to assist them.

In particular, she said, people with skills as plasterers, engineers, plumbers, electricians, tilers and cleaners were needed.

Her colleague, Maureen McCarthy, said each volunteer would have to raise approximately €3,000 themselves to pay for their flights, accommodation and food.

“It will be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for people to give something back” she said.

“We are so blessed in this country, but people in Missionvale are living on the edge; they have nothing and it is the perfect opportunity to make a big difference in their lives” she said.

“It’s a great challenge but it will be a good boost for people in Clare to do something positive”.

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