Over last year the Order of Malta intensified its AIDS prevention and treatment actions in Zululand, South Africa, a region where 88% of the population is HIV positive. In 2009, 225 people received antiretroviral treatment from the Order’s ‘Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard’ relief organization and 446 terminal patients were being cared for in its Hospice. 2180 house visits were carried out by antiretroviral therapy specialists and 2020 by home-care volunteers, while social workers made 1113 visits.

41 orphans live in the ‘Blessed Gerard’s Children Home’ in Mandeni. They all go to school and sister Edith Zulu, a Benedictine nun, and various European volunteers take care of their physical, psychological and spiritual development.

Over the last two years the Blessed Gérard Assistance Centre and Hospice for cancer and AIDS terminal patients has been enlarged. A facility conceived as a ‘bridge between hospital and home’ which father Gerard Tonque Lagleder – its founder and manager – set up to take in patients which the hospital can no longer care for and to help those who cannot be admitted to hospital.

In 2009 the ‘Brotherhood of Blessed Gérard’ celebrated the 15th year of its AIDS Prevention Programme, the tenth of its First Aid and Emergency Service, and the fifth of its Assistance Programme for HIV positive individuals and their families and their treatment with antiretroviral drugs.