Help Us to Liberate The Patient Shelter House!

Surabaya, as the capital city of Jawa Timur Province, has one of the biggest hospitals in Indonesia, namely Dr. Soetomo Hospital. Many smaller hospitals, clinics, and healthcare facilities all across the country (especially the eastern part of Indonesia) often use Dr. Soetomo Hospital as a referral hospital due to its advance healthcare facilities and technologies. The patients who come to this hospital are usually patients with severe illnesses, such as various types of cancer, tumors, diabetes, TBC, and also traffic accident injuries.

With Indonesia being one of the biggest archipelago countries, it often becomes a problem for the people who come to Surabaya from other cities, provinces, or even other islands to undergo medical treatments in Dr. Soetomo Hospital. Being far away from home, the patients, along with their companions, should look for temporary housing for them to stay while attending the treatments, or wait for the next procedures. They usually should rent a flat, boarding house, and such.

However, some patients in need often could not afford to rent housing, which forces them to become temporarily homeless. The patients and their companions could sleep anywhere from the hospital lobbies, local mosques, and even sidewalks. That could worsen the condition of the patients and their families, both physically and mentally. Hence, my colleagues and I established a program that provides free housing for those patients in need back in 2017. That is what we call as Patient Shelter House (Indonesian: Rumah Singgah Pasien). In this house, not only we provide shelter, but also daily feeding and ambulance services. All are free for the patients in need and their companions or families.

At this time, we rent a building where we established the shelter house at Jl. Pucang Adi, no. 15, Surabaya. We get the funding for the rent and the operational expenses from a philanthropy institution that my colleagues and I also work. However, the landlord plans to sell the building for a whopping 3 billion IDR or about 220,000 USD when the contract ends in July this year.

Our philanthropy institution, unfortunately, currently does not have that much amount of money to buy the house. Yet, we still fight to liberate our beloved Patient Shelter House. We care for those patients in need. We want to keep on supporting them while they focus on their therapies or rehabilitation processes.

We are here to ask all of the people around the world. Please, help us to liberate the Patient Shelter House and make it entirely ours. It's not the institution that owns it. But the house belongs to every poor patient that needs our help.