The Rose Parents of Mitchells Plain still give blooms of hope
For 25 years Maria Adams has opened her home in Mitchells Plain to patients who have been discharged from Lentegeur Psychiatric Hospital, offering a secure and loving environment to people whose families cannot or will not take them in. If the Life Esidimeni scandal epitomises the worst of state neglect for deinstitutionalised mental patients, then the care she provides under the banner of the Rose Parent Project is the polar opposite. It is a well-established initiative with strong oversight from authorities intent on safeguarding the interests of people with mental illness or intellectual disability. Over the past three decades it has placed more than 200 patients with over 100 foster families in 14 suburbs around Cape Town. "My granny always helped people and that spirit was in my mother too. I didn’t think I had it, until I had a dream in which I was wearing white like a nurse. That is what inspired me," says Adams, 80, who was married with three children when she took in her fi...
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