Remembering Eve van Grafhorst

But having shipped the furniture and equipment to PNG to establish that country's first HIV-AIDs hospice, it's been the wider world that's consumed us. Where once we had a paid staff of nine, we no longer pay anyone.

People in the desperately poor African nation of Malawi begged us for help (the blind calling on the lame!). Trapped in a seven-year-old famine, and with a host of homeless AIDs orphans, they had virtually nothing, their water wells drying up.

Visit our website at www.aids.net.au and check out the pictorial reports. We've built them shelters, a brick primary school known as The Australian Primary School, intended for 400, that's now catering for more than 600; then The Australian Secondary School for 300 teenagers; then bought land for crops, built a couple of shops, and bought a lorry.

We added a third school, The Australian Primary School at Nogwe in June this year (it's now got 602 pupils!) and are midway through building The Australian Secondary School there too. We talking about rural Malawi, where many of the children are AIDs orphans or children infected by HIV.

All up, directly and indirectly, we're educating more than 2,000 Malawian children. Me, I'm just a suburban grandpa now, and it's the immediate family and a handful of others throughout Australia who have their shoulders and hearts to the financial wheel.

A year or so ago, we became involved in sending knitted clothing to AIDs orphans in Africa, that soon broadened out into needy children the world over, even deep into Russia, Nepal, Rumania, Albania, South America and yes, inland Australia too - more than 600,000 items! For a year or so, we've been helping a South African mother of nine living in Johannesburg who's been renovating a large dilapidated house that's now home to 29 little ones with HIV-AIDs, aged between one and six-years-old. It's called Noah's Ark.

Days ago, I alerted the Australian media to a bizarre plan emanating from Indonesia's Papua Province where a doctor hopes to microchip people with HIV. The word “activist” returned. The Australian was the only newspaper that reported it, as did the ABC.

I'm very distant from my ABC news desk now, but I still remember the unforgettable. Raymond Myers the Pentridge prisoner who became a street worker and then became a woman, changing her name to Rebecca. A former boyfriend taunted her: "Yes, you've changed your name ... and you've got breasts ... but do you squat?"

An angry Rebecca, without pausing for a second, hotly replied with a naivety that would have melted the harpstrings of an angel " No, I don't. I've got my own apartment!" How the hurts and the sorrows and the hopes linger, even now.