Janet Ncube climbs the dusty red path from her mud home in the Valley of a Thousand Hills outside Durban, and casts her mind back to a day, six years ago, when she made the same climb but had to stop every few paces. “Today I still stop sometimes to look at the view,” the 49-year-old says quietly, resting her dark eyes on the rugged, hut-speckled slopes around her. “But that terrible day I stopped to pray for the strength to go on. I was full of pain and fear with this HIV sickness. I had to get help.”

Like others in this impoverished community, Janet found it at what some whisper is a “Place of Angels” – the Hillcrest AIDS Centre. Back in 2003 it was simply a metal shipping container in the grounds of the Hillcrest Methodist church. A small team under a registered nurse offered HIV testing, counselling, medication, food parcels, education and the support of dedicated homecare volunteers. But for many, including Janet, it was the training they received under the centre’s Woza Moya (“come holy spirit” or “come change” in Zulu) craft project run by 38-year-old Paula Thomson that has helped them the most.

Janet’s husband had left her with seven children; two had died from tuberculosis and none had jobs. But some of her children now excitedly emerge from her house to greet Paula, who has come to visit.

“Paula showed me a way to help myself and my family,” Janet smiles, watching the vibrant brunette in jeans and vivid beadwork banter in Zulu with her children. “Today we have electricity, a tap and fares for the school bus. Paula and Woza Moya gave me purpose.”

It’s a story told by many of the other women back at the centre. There, the premises now include a basic but comfortable 25-bed respite care unit and a community organic vegetable garden. But the centre’s warm heart is the Woza Moya workshop – a barn-like brick building bright with coloured beadwork and bolts of fabric, pumping with the strains of Ukhozi FM Zulu radio and the chatter of contented, busy women.

“Sometimes I forget they are sick,” Paula confides, surveying them with affection. “I think they forget, too, and it helps them!” When Janet began vomiting blood after joining the project and was taken for pioneering vascular surgery at a nearby hospital, Paula told her she couldn’t die – she had to finish a crochet order for top South African fashion designer Amanda Laird Cherry. “Janet pulled through, in spite of a compromised immune system. When I think how far she and these other women have come, I have to pinch myself. I feel so honoured to have been a part of this.”

It’s been a crucial part, although Paula is too modest to say so, starting when she gave up a teaching post at a top private high school to join the team in the cramped shipping container. She had run a school outreach project, with her pupils partnering centre patients. They taught 13 women fabric painting, and designed shopping bags which the women made and the schoolchildren sold at flea markets. Then an order came in for 1000 bags for an international conference in Durban. “Suddenly I was running a business, battling to keep up with orders!” she says, still surprised.

When the centre received funding from German Agro Action, Paula was offered a part-time job with the project. “My husband, Bruce, was newly ­qualified as a homeopath and we’d just bought our first home, but he said, “You’re passionate about it, Paula: do it!’ ” Today, Woza Moya has 300 women skilled in crafts from beading and sewing to crochet and pottery. For many it’s the first time they are earning, and they support and train others at home: “Brothers, boyfriends, grannies – some women have 30 people beading or sewing under them,” she says proudly. When she received an order for 200,000 beaded AIDS ribbons from Gap International in 2006, she worked with 810 women.

Tired of ribbons, Paula then suggested introducing a human element in their designs. She and the women sat with beads and fabric, and each made a brooch figurine with its own character. The first dolls, which are not much bigger than a safety pin, were sold at a flea market seven years ago. “A granny bought one and rushed back for another because someone had asked for hers, and it had moved on,” she says, “So we called them ‘Little Travellers’.”