Assistance at home

W�rzburg - Germany

From the beginning, love for the elderly has represented the choice of loving the poor. The poverty of the elderly is caused not only by limited economic resources: as they become older and sick and face the lost of self-sufficiency, the elderly experiment the precarious state of their personal resources. To this difficult situation one should also add additional poverty caused by the isolation and abandonment often suffered by the elderly. In order to confront the �destiny� of hospitalisation for many elderly, the Community started its service of assistance at home. 

Friendship, direct contact, personal involvement with the elderly, can appear to be inadequate means to confront problems that would seem to require a much more complex and structural response. Nevertheless, in these years, friendship and close relations with the elderly have radically contrasted the spiral of alienation and have broken the isolation of many elderly.