FORMER banker Lynna Chandra's original idea was to set up hospices for children with HIV in Indonesia, India and Myanmar in three years.
It was a plan that she now admits as naive. 'I was in the typical 'banker mode', thinking how difficult could it be to build a hospice in Jakarta, get it operational and hand it over to the local people, and then go back to work after taking a year off,' she says.
It's been two years, and the 41-year-old still hasn't taken up consulting jobs which was what she used to do when she left UBS, but her first hospice - Rachel House - is off to a modest start in Jakarta.
The charity is named after a friend who died of cancer. 'At that time, I didn't even know what a hospice was,' she reveals. 'But I was helping to look after her . . . and there was all this support around. The thought occurred to me that there must be a lot of children with HIV who died without the same support, and perhaps abandoned because a lot of families aren't comfortable with HIV.'
Another friend challenged her to do something about it, and with a 'why not' ringing in her mind, in 2005, Ms Chandra started to seriously research the possibility of setting up a hospice for children with HIV in Jakarta.
'I found out for example, that there weren't any hospices in Jakarta, and no proper structure for palliative care,' she says.
'What I wanted to do was to fill in the gap, to provide a service that wasn't there before,' adds Ms Chandra, who had tapped into her own funds at first to lay the groundwork for Rachel House, and travelled to Jakarta every other week before the hospice was finally up and running.
Rachel House now operates as a small pilot project within an existing hospital to care for children with terminal cancer first, with the intention of following this with HIV care soon after. It received its first patient on Dec 6. The original plan was to build a 60-bed paediatric hospice; but after meeting countless challenges, she decided to modify her plans.
The hospice community in Singapore has been tremendously helpful and her greatest inspiration, she states. 'They've never said no when I asked for help.' With the help of nurses from KK Hospital and Dover Park Hospice, for example, Ms Chandra has managed to get some Indonesian nurses trained in hospice procedures.
With all the difficulties she faced, was giving up and just helping out with a hospice service in Singapore or any other children's organisation here an option? 'I can't walk away . . . not when I'd seen children in pain in the last days of their lives, because their parents couldn't afford medication to relieve pain; when I'd seen children who'd received chemotherapy dipping their fingers in ice-cold water as the only way to alleviate the pain,' she says.
The aim is that no child should die alone and in pain. There's seven-year-old Ayu for example, who has cancer of the eye which spread to her liver and brain. She now gets morphine, so that when she's at the hospice, she can sleep painlessly, or otherwise play - just like a normal kid.
'These are stories that keep me going,' adds Ms Chandra.
This article was first published in The Business Times on December 19, 2008.
