People care for one another to a remarkable degree when you consider how much informal caregiving exists in society. Not everyone is capable of it. Some live only for themselves. Yet in my practice as a general practitioner I also see many families in which caring for one another occupies a central place.<\/span><\/p>\n It is what most of us really want. You care about your partner, or you raise one or more children together, who will grow into adults. This requires no small amount of unpaid care work.<\/span><\/p>\n Much of that care takes place quietly, almost invisibly. Society could never replace these hidden acts of care with professional services alone. Those services are in any case already overburdened in a society where the demand for care continues to rise because of an aging population.<\/span><\/p>\n If we want to remain capable of meeting these caregiving needs in the future, we will have to learn to draw more effectively upon the energy that exists among ordinary people themselves\u2014encouraging it, supporting it, and guiding it.<\/span><\/p>\n Informal caregiving borders on volunteer work and often merges with it. In the 1980s I played a role in establishing and helping to run what was then called <\/span>The Foundation vzw<\/b>. In practice it involved training and supervising \u201cbuddies\u201d: volunteers willing to accompany an AIDS patient or a person living with HIV for part of their journey.<\/span><\/p>\n