Agape helping sick people

TWENTY-two year-old Rose has been a patient in the general medical ward 4B at Port Moresby General Hospital for the past 13 months.
She has severe tuberculosis and is paralysed from the waist down.
As the longest resident patient in Ward 4B, she has witnessed and has been recipient of donations and other charitable works from church groups, donors and ordinary Papua New Guineans.
On Sept 11, Rose and her fellow patients were recipients of a donation and a short sermon from the Agape inter-denomination ministry, led by chairman of the NCD provincial AIDS council Pr Daniel Hewiali.
Pr Daniel said that praying for the sick brothers and sisters helped them spiritually but there was also a need to help them physically.
“Many people always pray for these patients to be healed but they don’t help them physically, so we at Agape try to put our prayers into action.
 “Our group, the Agape charity ministry, tries to meet these physical needs by coming around every fortnight to give them clothes and toiletries to lift their morale,” Pr Daniel said. 
“What we do is take time to be with people with HIV/AIDS and other curable diseases by sharing the Word of God with them and encouraging them to not give up. And then we give them what we have brought,” he said.
Agape charity ministry coordinator Ruth Hewiali said the work they did would go a long way if only they had more assistance.
She said that at the moment, the things that they donated to the patients came from unemployed women, mothers and widows.
The Agape charity ministry works in partnership with other faith-based organisations and the Morata AOG Livingwaters church to do this work.
Rose said  she liked what they did because it gave her and other patients hope and that people did care.