Natasha Groenewald

I attribute my success to the School of Hard Knocks. When you do what you have to do every single day to survive, you do those things, but you do get to a point in life where you can do something because you want to do it, because it fulfills you. I've got an attitude of being the eternal optimist. I look for a rainbow in every single storm. I never give up. I make do with what I have, and that's the one thing that hospice has taught me tremendously, especially when you are caring for somebody whose economic background is incredibly challenged. You make do with what you have, and you try and create as much comfort as you can with what you have.

I would credit a gentleman, Zane Bulbulia, who is the Director of Disability in the Premier's office in South Africa. Zane himself is disabled and in a wheelchair, and he's not just a work colleague but also a close friend. What really stood out to me and always taught me is that when we visit various institutions, hospices, children's homes, things like that, Zane never goes in. He does not go and meet the children, because his view is that the children are not on for display. They are human beings with feelings and emotions, just like I am, just like you are. These children see all these feet come through the children's home to gawk at them and look at them. That is quite a profound lesson that he had taught me, that I implement myself.

To young women in this industry, you've got to choose this industry. Don't just fall into it. You'll find that a lot of people that work in hospice are older, and maybe it's because they have gone through life. You have to choose the industry, and you need to understand and go delve into what it means to be, the difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion. Hospice is not just end-of-life care. I want to make this quite pointedly. The scope of hospice is actually very large, and it goes hand-in-hand with medicine and social welfare and social services. You build a village around you, where you reach out to other people when you need resources, whatever that resource might be, when you need food, when you need personal care products, or you need a spiritual advisor, whomever that may be, you may need a priest, you may need to reunify family members, things like that.

The opportunities are huge, because people don't choose it. People are scared of hospice and palliation, and what does it mean to work in death? People are very afraid of it, because we don't treat death as a natural process. Death is natural as much as life is natural. It's part of the circle, part of it. So the opportunity to work in hospice care is tremendous. It's very big. The biggest challenge is our own perception of hospice, palliation, and death. The fact that we don't speak about these subjects. That is the biggest obstacle, because if we don't speak about it, we don't have information about it.

The first thing is compassion. You need to understand the difference between sympathy, empathy, and compassion, because there's a difference between the three of them. To work in the field of palliation and hospice, you choose that. Nobody enters medicine to sit at somebody's deathbed. People enter medicine to cure, to find cures for things, to help. They don't enter medicine to sit at somebody's deathbed. So you need to understand the difference between those three things, and I think compassion is probably the first pillar, the first thing. The second thing is altruism. You are doing something for someone else, and not expecting a single thing in return.