“When I started to work, my aim was to tell, to shout to this human being that you have a value, you have dignity. They are not what they face, they are not the conditions they find themselves in. They are not the sickness; they are not the poverty. So my aim to work was that every human being has a value, has dignity.”
—Rose Busingye
Meeting Point International
A holistic support agency for people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS
Meet the Caregiver
Rose Busingye is a nurse who worked in St. Francis Hospital Nsambya during the height of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Trained in both Uganda and Italy, she focused on holistic care for those who have been rejected or neglected by society.
A Memorable Meeting
As a young child attending Catholic school, Rose had an early encounter with the famous Catholic priest and activist, Luigi Guissani. Guissani founded the Catholic social action movement, Communion and Liberation, and was visiting a Catholic high school in Uganda when Rose was a teenager. She had read some of his books, so when she knew he was in her country, she was eager to meet him. That meeting would stick in her memory as a moment of revelation about her value and purpose:
“When I reached him, he gave special attention to me…He told me that if I was the only remaining person on earth remaining God would come for me… That was a revolution to me, my life changed. He told me no body can take the value I have from me; You were created with that value. It is infinite value.
He was talking while looking at me and I felt I had won a battle, I felt nothing on this earth can ever touch me, I felt myself. I wished this for every human being. I wished every human being was looked at the same way this man looked at me.”
Starting the Work
After meeting Guissani, Rose went on to study nursing, and to get a scholarship to study in Italy. When she returned and was working in the hospital, she saw many patients with HIV/AIDS. She started to move beyond her role, visiting patients in their homes and communities to follow-up, making sure they had food and medicine, and giving them emotional encouragement. Her goal was to make sure people dealing with poverty and illness understood their own dignity and worth, and to convey that to them through holistic attention—seeing the person, not just the problem.
Meeting Point Today
In 1992, Rose left her job at the hospital and started Meeting Point International as a community based organization. They set up outreach stations in several slums of Kamala, and worked to organize loans and savings groups among some of their clients, especially to afford housing in the rapidly growing city. She built a welcoming house for children who had been abandoned, and developed many partnerships with foreign organizations, especially sponsors in the Catholic Church in Italy, and within the Communion and Liberation Network.
Later she was featured in a documentary called Greater: Defeating AIDS, from an Italian film company.
In 2019, she was awarded the Ford Family Notre Dame Award for International Development and Solidarity by the University of Notre Dame.
To learn more and to support Meeting Point International, visit their website.