Who We Help
Your local association supporting English-speaking people in France whose lives have been touched by cancer. Covering 87 (Haute-Vienne), 23 (Creuse), 19 ( Corrèze) and 36 (Indre), and throughout France via the National CSF Helpline.
What help do we offer?
We are a listening service. Our volunteers are called Active Listeners. We come from all walks of life and some of us have been in the caring professions and some have not. We are a listening ear to let you talk freely about your concerns and your emotions. We cannot offer medical advice or support and cannot recommend any services to you but we can offer you advice on how to find such advice and support of various kinds.
We can provide emotional support to English speakers who have cancer and their close family members. We can also give translation support in meetings with medical staff (this will be just direct translation as we are not medically qualified) either in person or by telephone and also help with filling in forms or understanding documents written in French. For more information on this see our How We Can Help page.
Whatever your country of origin, if you speak English, we can support you. All our Active Listeners and other volunteers are speakers of English.
Supporting the people around a cancer patient – family, friend, carer
Cancer does not only affect the person with the illness. Friends and family around the patient can also find that it impacts heavily on their lives, in terms of the time that they have to devote to caring, and the emotional stress it can cause. We can offer an Active Listener to those close to a cancer patient, and it will be a different person from the one supporting the patient him or herself, so that the feelings of each are kept confidential from the other.
The person needing help needs to contact us directly
As we have indicated we support English speakers who have cancer, their family and friends. Part of the underlying purpose of what we do is to enable the person we support to regain some control over their lives. The first step in this is to acknowledge the need for support. So we do not accept referrals from third parties. We need to be approached by the person who needs the support.