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A prayer attributed to Sir Francis Drake:

“Disturb us Lord, when we are too well pleased with ourselves

then our dreams have come true because we have dreamed too little

When we have arrived safely because we sailed too close to the shore

Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, to venture on wider seas

Where storms will show your mastery; where losing sight of land

We shall find the stars

We ask you to push back the horizons of our hopes and to push into the future

In strength, courage, hope and love”.

Dear Friends,

2007 - new hope, new name, new logo……

Last November, at the 6th annual "Edelweiss Ball" organised by Crier Group in aid of Hospice Casa Sperantei at the Bucharest Athenee Palace Hilton, something extraordinary happened. Halfway through the auction, someone passed me a note to say that a Romanian lady in the room wanted to bid 1,000 Euros for the training of a doctor. I passed the note to the auctioneer (my friend John Whitbread) and suggested he added an extra “auction item”. At this point he was in the middle of auctioning a piece of art, and had reached 150 Euros when a gentleman in the room who was bidding for it suddenly asked how much it would cost to support a doctor for a year. John looked confused, and told the gentleman that this item would come later. He persisted and I told John that a doctor’s salary for a year would be 9,000 Euros. “O.K”, said the gentleman, “I’ll bid 9,000 Euros”. The room broke out in applause. What followed was simply amazing – 4 more people bid 9,000 Euros to support a doctor for a year, and the total raised on the night was a magnificent £60,000. Some of the staff present from the hospice were in tears – at last, Romanians were beginning to catch the spirit of giving. It seemed as though all the hard work over the past 15 years was beginning to pay off. For the first time there was real hope that the hospice in Brasov could soon become self-sustainable.

This means that we can now start to focus more on our wider goal: to ensure that all patients in Romania and the surrounding countries have access to hospice care. We therefore took the opportunity at the beginning of this year to think about our message for the future. We were fortunate to have the help of a friend who runs a company specialising in PR and media, and who came up with some fresh ideas. After much discussion and consultation, the trustees made the decision to change our name slightly to “Hospices of Hope” in order to better reflect the wider goals, and to adopt a new “tree” logo for the UK charity.

23 years ago, when I attended my very first hospice meeting, Prue Dufour, one of the early hospice pioneers told us that “large oak trees grow from small acorns. When you start a project, you never know where it will lead”.  Thanks to the generosity of our supporters in the UK, the roots of the charity have been well watered over the years and the trunk (Casa Sperantei, Centre of Excellence) is now strong and firm.  The branches (Bucharest, Oradea, Cluj, Sibiu, Timisoara, Belgrade, Chisinau and many more) are now growing, the leaves (representing the 4,000 or more medical and nursing staff already trained in palliative care) are blossoming, and thousands of patients (the fruit) are now receiving better care in the advanced stages of their illness.

Sometimes, I think it would be nice to feel that the task is nearing completion.  However, all of us involved in Hospices of Hope know just how much remains to be done.  Still less than 5% of terminally ill patients in Romania are receiving any form of hospice care and a huge number of people are still locked in abject poverty.  I hope you will help us to ensure that the “tree” continues to flourish, that more branches appear in the coming years, and that the leaves and fruit continue to appear in good measure.

I found the prayer at the top of this letter, in my brother’s Christmas Newsletter.  I thought it was very relevant for the year ahead for Hospices of Hope.

Yours sincerely

Graham Perolls

Executive Director

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