Aids sufferers in Rwanda will be getting a helping hand from volunteers who will help to build a medical unit.

Eight members of the Rotary Club of Preston Guild branch will travel to Kibogora Hospital, Kibogora, south west Rwanda, on January 28, to construct a new two-storey HIV and AIDS treatment centre which will be dedicated to treating the 150,000 people from the hospital serves.

The group raised £6,000 to pay for equipment for the centre and plan to take second-hand beds left over from the former Sharoe Green Hospital, Preston.

Ian Higginbotham, 56, of Whittle Green, Woodplumpton, raised £3,000 in July from a six-day trek of the 19,340ft Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with son Mark, 32.

Ian, a former treasurer for Victim Support Lancashire, said: "This place needs to get up and running.

"Dozens of people that need help queue outside the outpatients clinic first thing in a morning. We needed to do something and the money we have raised will pay for everything that will go inside the unit."

Also taking the trip are Ian's wife, Val, George Turner, fundraising manager at Penwortham-based Galloway's Society for the Blind, branch chairman, Neale Roach, Tony Billington, Geoff Oldham, Clare Watson and Steve Ashcroft.

The project is organised by the charity, Kibogora Initiative, which was started in 1999 after an appeal by Sheila Etherington, originally from Fulwood, who went to live in Rwanda 20 years ago. It was started to help children who had been orphaned by war and the genocide in the region.

Mrs Etherington, who is currently visiting the UK, said: "The way people in Preston have supported the Kibogora Initiative is wonderful."

In 2000 members of Fulwood Free Methodist Church, Lightfoot Lane, Fulwood, provided funding for the Kibogora Initiative to set up support group, Project Action Social de Kibogora (PASK), which employs four staff to act as social workers and supervisors to help young people become self sufficient.