STORY 87
There is no dramatic founding myth here. No single visionary. No government programme that handed down a building and a budget. The Helderberg Hospice was built by ordinary people who looked around and saw that their community was dying in the literal, specific, unavoidable sense and that it was dying without adequate care.
The year was 1985. South Africa was in a state of political emergency. The townships were burning. The newspapers were censored. People were being detained without trial. In Somerset West, a group of women who were nurses and doctors and concerned citizens sat down together and talked about something that had nothing directly to do with politics and everything to do with the most basic human obligation: the care of the dying.
Palliative care the medical and nursing discipline concerned with the comfort and dignity of people at the end of life was barely established in South Africa in 1985. The hospice movement had been growing in Britain since Dame Cicely Saunders opened St Christopher’s Hospice in London in 1967. The idea was simple and radical simultaneously: that dying was not a medical failure to be fought until the last possible moment, but a human event that deserved the same skill and compassion and attention that any other phase of life deserved.
The founders of the Helderberg Hospice understood this. They had seen people die in hospital wards where there was no time for comfort, no framework for pain management, no support for the family watching from the corner of the room. They knew there was a better way to do it. They decided to build that better way themselves.
The hospice started with almost nothing volunteers, a rented space, equipment borrowed and donated and improvised. The community was asked for support and the community responded. The response was not immediate or overwhelming. It was steady. The golf clubs ran charity days. The churches held collections. The schools raised money. The farms donated. The businesses contributed. Year after year, the hospice grew not through any single large gift but through the accumulated generosity of a community that had decided this was something worth paying for.
By the time the Helderberg Hospice moved into its own purpose-built facility a comfortable, well-designed building with rooms that look out over gardens, with enough space for patients and their families, with the equipment that modern palliative care requires it had been built entirely on community fundraising. No government capital grant. No large corporate foundation. The people of the Helderberg built it themselves.
The hospice serves patients at the end of life cancer organ failure, neurological disease, the accumulated decline of extreme old age. It provides in-patient care and a home nursing service, the latter allowing people to die in their own homes with professional support around them. The home nursing service is, in many ways, the hospice’s most important work. The ideal death if such a phrase can be used is a death at home, with family, without unnecessary pain, with time to say what needs to be said. The Helderberg Hospice’s nurses make that possible for hundreds of families every year.
It has never been wealthy. It has never been comfortably funded. The work of fundraising never ends because the work of caring never ends. Every year the community is asked again. Every year the community responds again. The cycle has been running for forty years.
There is something in this that says something important about the Helderberg not the Helderberg of wine estates and Saturday markets and celebrity golfers, but the underlying community that was here before those things arrived and will be here after they change shape again. A community is not its infrastructure or its economy or its property prices. A community is what it does when one of its own is dying and needs help.
The Helderberg built a hospice. It has been running it, by hand, in the old-fashioned way of neighbours helping neighbours, for forty years.
That matters. That is worth knowing.
Between You and Me:
1985 was not a gentle year in South Africa. The country was, by any measure, in crisis and in the middle of that crisis, a group of women in Somerset West sat down to talk about end-of-life care. Not politics. Not the headlines. The quiet, unglamorous, essential question of how people in their community died and whether it could be done with more dignity than the system currently allowed. I find something important in the timing. The biggest things a community does for itself are not always responses to the biggest things happening around it. Sometimes the most significant decision a group of people can make, in the middle of a national crisis, is to address something much smaller and much more immediate and then simply keep doing it for forty years.
Historian – Harmen Bockelenberg
Next week: rugby, cricket and the Saturday mornings that organised the social life of the Helderberg for a hundred years.
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