A Home Away From Home

The ASHIC Foundation, a non-profit organisation, is a home full of love, care, comfort and affection for many of the country's underprivileged children who have developed cancer. ASHIC (A Shelter for Helpless Ill Children) offers a free home for both children being treated for cancer and their parents, while a palliative unit -- the only of its kind in the country -- run by the foundation serves to brighten the last remaining days of terminally ill paediatric cancer patients. Here, the children spend their days playing games and eating their favourite food as they go through the often-frightening and always gruelling process of chemotherapy and other medical procedures. The parents of the children too benefit from counselling sessions, a safe and free place to stay at and the kind words and expertise offered by in-house professionals. ASHIC stays with its many children to the end of their lives, when the foundation bids farewell by arranging the last journeys back home of the lives that ended too soon. The foundation was set up in 1994.

Photo: Anisur Rahman