Marlies Wierda 

Marlies is 18 years old and lives in Holland. In November and December 2003 she worked as a volunteer at a care center for AIDS-orphans in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In one of her e-mails home she writes:

"Friday we celebrated Christmas at the hospice. It is a centre where people with AIDS and TB are cared for, usually until they die. The celebration was meant for the patients, but especially for their children and families and the kids from the community. We started out with about 10 kids, but after they all decided to invite their friends there were more than 100 kids... Total chaos."

"In the morning we had two boxes of ice-cream and cones, and we brought an ice-cream to all the patients; believe me, the image of the people so sick, with almost no flesh to their bone and a face as if they've never laughed is etched in my memory forever. I gave an ice-cream to a really sick man, and later we heard that he died that same afternoon... quite a shocking experience. Those people enjoyed their ice-cream so much, you almost feel like bringing them one each day. What a totally different world these people live in. So sick, no hope left, all they want to do is to die as soon as possible. What a misery..."