Rejoice Charity is a grassroots charity project based in Chiang Mai province, Northern Thailand, near the foot of the famous Doi Suthep Mountain and temple. We were founded on January 11, 1998 and have been fully operational for over 10 years. We have full-time staff and a number of part-time local and foreign volunteers.

Our co-founders are cousins, Derek Hallam and Gareth Lavell; both former nurses and businessmen from the United Kingdom, and Derek is still our chief today. Both of them left their nursing profession and setup a security company. They became wealthy and were able to travel the world, but it was a trip to India that changed their lives. While on holiday in India, they were sipping champagne in their 5-star hotel, when a look out from their hotel room to the streets below changed the course of their lives forever.

They saw real poverty for the first time, children were scavenging for food in the garbage dumps. They were so moved they gave up their business and sold their houses, intending to move to India to do outreach work. However, fate intervened. It was election time in India and the British Foreign Office advised them to choose another country. They settled for Thailand as they had been there before and felt it was a safe country to settle in. When their financial resources were depleted, they had to depend solely on the generosity of donors. For them, it is a mission based on love.

Initially they set up three successful Aids hospices in the capital, Bangkok, including the first slum-based community hospice in the country. After five years of operating the hospices and training personnel, they turned the centres' management over to Thai employees. Seeing an urgent need to support those affected by HIV/Aids in the Chiang Mai area, Derek and Gareth, assisted by Lampoo, a senior staff member, moved to Northern Thailand to set up the charity that has since become Rejoice.

In 2004, a group of supporters, together with Derek and Gareth, established the Rejoice Foundation UK, a British-registered charity, dedicated to the same ideals.

Rejoice's goal is to provide a much-needed medical and social support system to poor, ill and underprivileged people living in Chiang Mai's villages and other peripheral communities throughout the province. Our care programme addresses the diverse array of basic medical and social needs demonstrated by the men, women and children infected with, or affected by, HIV.

By providing access to basic health care in the village communities, we also aim to improve health standards through medical services, education and skills transfer.

We support people living with HIV to continue to work to provide for their family, and help orphaned children return to school to receive the education they need and deserve in an environment of support, acceptance and encouragement. And we seek to help people break out of the vicious circle of poverty associated with this disease.

Gareth Lavell has left Rejoice in 2008 and Steve Hallam is running Rejoice as the Director. Steve does not draw any salary from Rejoice and is living on a pension from the UK. He travels almost 100km daily in the Rejoice vehicle visiting clinics, homes and child care centres.