In 1997, John Hart set up a project in Ecuador which provides Aids orphans with a home and a family structure to meet their emotional, physical, and spiritual needs.

In the last ten years "Orphaids", the name of his charity, has raised funds and built a large facility near the city of Santo Domingo de los Colorados, 130 kilometres west of the capital Quito.

Four houses have been built as living quarters for the children who range in age from small babies to teenagers. "House parents" also live there to provide a sense of normality and care for up to 6 children.

There are also four apartments for use by families where one or both of the parents are HIV positive.

"The idea is to help the ailing parents to feel secure about the future of their children" he says. "The families can come for respite care, or if accepted in the later stages of the disease, they can come and stay until they need palliative care, at which time their children will be transferred to a house, with house parents."

John is 66 years of age, and although he now lives in Kent in the South East of England, he still travels back and forth to Ecuador up to four or five times a year.

He became aware of the plight of the world's poor at a very early age, and by the time he was 16, he had vowed to do something about it.

He trained as a nurse, married and had two children before fulfilling his dream of serving an indigenous tribe in Ecuador. In 1967 he and his family went to live there while he worked on a project to prevent the biggest killer in the region at the time, which was tuberculosis. With the help of government programme, the scourge of TB was successfully eradicated.

They returned to England when the time came for their children to attend secondary school. John then trained as a pastor in a local Baptist church.

Years later in 1996 another call for help came from Ecuador, but this time it wasn't TB but Aids related. A mission hospital in Quito was asking John to establish an orphanage for children whose parents had died of AIDS related diseases.

John responded.