Gopane is one of the rural areas found in the north part of our province (North West), about 9km to the Lobatse (Botswana) border. The need to address issues of poverty, HIV/AIDS and related diseases grew from 0% to 10% in the year 2000. The challenge of Tswana speaking community dealing with death and realities of HIV/AIDS is not bearable. There are still issues of stigma, people are not open about the sickness related to HIV, suicides and mental problems caused by stress, drug abuse and lack of counselling specialists is the order of everyday. Lack of proper services from the community clinic, lack of care giving volunteers and poor water supply facilities is a challenge to overcome. All these challenges and or needs needed someone to deal with or ultimately address them. It took a professional nurse administrator, a tutor, advanced midwife who completed a dispensing course with Medusa to start doing something.

She started by mobilising affected women and men, who used her services privately for their patients, she then asks them to volunteer and started a home based care. It started as a single room with one bed, today it is a double garage with six beds for terminally ill patients. The whole circle of sickness related to HIV/AIDS has left a lot of young headed families. We have 60 families within our village which are child and grandparent-headed. On a weekend base we feed 20 teenagers plus their siblings with lunch and supper. The focus is not only on the sick but also on their children. Ebenezer Health Services was in this way established.