Our project of the children's hospice is slightly broader - we’d like to set up a facility consisting of two relatively self-contained buildings:

• a purpose-built nursing unit offering more specialised medical and nursing care to sick children and their families and



• an "open house" - a respite care unit and social centre serving as a bridge between the "inner" and the "outer" worlds. The open house is to accommodate a library, video-library, study room, gymnasium, workshops etc. that will be available to sick children and their families staying on the premises (if their condition permits), but also - at least to some extent - to "healthy" people who may wish to come.

In our first leaflet published in 1991, we described the purpose of visits to the open house in these words:

(Staying in the house) may help children, and their parents as well, to perceive themselves, their own lives, the whole world, in slightly a different way, in broader context - and it usually is both useful and easing.

All the people are individuals - we can hardly predict what the stay would mean for each of the potential visitors - for some it might be a significant experience, for some just holiday in the countryside.

We want the stays not to be strictly programmed - we'd like them just to suggest something new, to offer opportunities, to bring unplanned and sometimes even invisible, personal, private challenges. And that actually is the principal aim of the whole project.