Maine Rotarians forge link with South Africa Fund raising aimed at hospice for AIDS patients

BRUNSWICK – It would seem an impossibly daunting challenge: a 13-member Rotary group in Maine looking to raise $200,000 to establish a hospice for dying AIDS patients in one of South Africa’s most impoverished regions.

But the project – the brainchild of a Harpswell lobsterman with family ties to South Africa – came to fruition two months ago with the dedication of the Palliative Care Center at St. Mary’s Hospital in Marianhill, 20 miles outside Durban.

For Brunswick Coastal Rotary Club members, the 20-bed hospice wing is not the final chapter. The club is working on a plan to sell a recording of African music to fund the work of hundreds of home-based health workers who can provide care and comfort for the untold numbers of AIDS-stricken people in the region.

Some 4.7 million South Africans – one in nine – have the HIV virus that causes AIDS, more than any other country in the world.

“Obviously, 20 beds against the backdrop of the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa is not even a ripple,” said John Dennen, 57, who spent 30 years in South Africa before moving to Maine, where he took up lobstering.

Dennen returned this month from South Africa, where he participated in the dedication of the hospice wing at the century-old hospital built by missionaries. The hospice has two 10-bed wards, one for men, the other for women.

“The wards themselves are like showcases. They’re absolutely first-world – beautiful and clean, a place where people can die without fear and with dignity,” he said. There also is an area for family members to visit and cook meals.

Roughly half of the $200,000 was used to convert part of St. Mary’s to a hospice and buy essential equipment.

The rest is earmarked for training 300 volunteer health care workers who will fan out into a region of 750,000 people in KwaZulu-Natal.

The Rotary project took root from Dennen’s contacts in Maine and South Africa. A lifelong U.S. citizen, he moved to Maine in the early 1980s knowing that he and his wife, Indrani, who is of Indian ancestry and dark-skinned, faced a grim future under the pro-apartheid government then in power.

Dennen returns to South Africa for a few months each winter to see family members and purchase African-made crafts for sale in his wife’s shop in Brunswick. During a trip in the mid-1990s he was treated by a dentist who turned out to be a fellow Rotarian belonging to a club even smaller than his own.

A visit to the dentist’s club in a town near Marianhill gave rise to a joint project to raise $6,000 to buy an incubator for St. Mary’s Hospital to improve the survival chances of babies with low birth weights.

When Dennen returned to Brunswick, his fellow club members embraced the idea with enthusiasm. They obtained a matching grant from the Rotary Foundation, and raised the remaining $3,000 through events such as raffles, fruit sales and a concert.

The gift was presented at a hospital ceremony in which the donors were greeted with songs of praise. Dennen recalled the feel-good atmosphere and how “our chests were all puffed out.”

There were about 50 babies in the pediatric ward, and Dennen remarked to St. Mary’s director on how beautiful they all looked.

“He replied, ‘Yes, they are. It’s a pity that more than 50 percent of them are HIV positive.’ That was kind of deflating. All of sudden we weren’t feeling like such heroes.” He wanted to do more to help.

Returning to Brunswick, Dennen was amazed at the reaction of fellow Rotarians when he approached them with the idea of trying to raise $200,000 for an AIDS hospice.

“They said, ‘Hey, that’s not a problem. We can do that,”‘ Dennen recalled.

The club, minuscule in membership by Rotary standards, proved true to its word.

Trisha Hunter, a former club president and now incoming district governor, was dogged in pursuit of the goal. She and Dennen teamed up with a club in South Africa and another in Australia to pursue one of the Rotary Foundation’s Health, Hunger and Humanity grants.

Applicants for those grants faced stiff competition, but Brunswick caught a break because one of its members, Tom Stypinski, worked for a Bath Iron Works subcontractor and was experienced in writing proposals. Hunter and Dennen said his skills were crucial in landing the $150,000 award in the spring of 2001.

The grant money, coupled with funds raised locally and by the club in Australia, set the stage for construction to begin. The work took longer than expected, but the facility opened Feb. 24.

Now, the club is in the midst of an equally ambitious effort to raise another $200,000 through sales of the music CD to pay for the work of the home health care volunteers and to fund an orphanage.

The CD, recorded by African musicians from KwaZulu-Natal, went on sale a few months ago at Indrani Dennen’s shop. Interest generated locally by word of mouth has produced sales totaling $10,000, all of which is earmarked for the Rotary project.

The club also plans to offer the CD to the 1.2 million Rotarians worldwide and to launch a Web site to market the disc.