ZAMBIA
Happy Place To Be
by Marian Pallister
Journalist Marian Pallister visits Zambia twice a year to work with the Catholic radio station in Lusaka. Her “home” there is the Comboni mission in Lilanda parish, where the priests and sisters follow the example of St Daniel Comboni, canonized recently.
Lilanda parish sprawls across the western fringe of the Zambian capital city, Lusaka. It is one of the city’s poorest townships.
Breeze block huts spring up overnight on any spare inch of land. The roads, tarred in better times, are now deeply pot-holed dirt tracks and children play in piles of refuse alongside the rats.
The ways we live
When Fr Dario Chaves bumps along these roads back home to the Comboni Mission house at St Andrew Kaggwa church, the children flock round his beaten up Toyota pick-up truck shouting a welcoming “Abambo! Abambo!” - “Father! Father!”
Sometimes he will take a few kids into town for the ride, their eyes popping when they see how the other half lives.
Makeshift stalls line the dirt roads of Lilanda - a few tomatoes on one, little bags of mealie meal on another. The days when a family could buy a 95 kg bag of maize to make “nsima” for the family for a month are long gone. Only 30 per cent of Zambians are in formal work and the rest get by on less than a dollar a day.
Women pay over the odds for maize to make the one meal a day they can afford to give their extended family.
Few households these days have just their own children to look after. With one in five Zambians affected by HIV/AIDS, most households are looking after a dead brother’s kids or a new partner’s family. A cabbage costs 2000 kwacha (about 60 US cents) and a woman might earn just 6000 kwacha (around $1.20) a day cleaning.
Thriving
It sounds a miserable existence - but St Andrew Kaggwa church bubbles with joy during Sunday Masses and is a hive of Christian activity throughout the week.
The parish was initiated by Comboni Missionaries and has developed over the past decade into a thriving community in which ever-present poverty, disease and injustice are tackled with ingenuity and faith.
Daniel Comboni, who was canonized in Rome last October, was a missionary whose ideas were ahead of his time. In the mid-19th century, when disempowering colonization was at its height, he traveled to Africa and developed his dream of saving Africa through Africans.
Today, Fr Dario is doing just that. The Portuguese parish priest, assisted by Fr Dawit from Ethiopia and Fr Jude from South Africa, is offering Zambia’s poorest citizens the means to improve their lives.
Together with Fr Piero from Italy, who works in the neighboring parish of Kizito, and a team of dedicated Comboni sisters, they are changing the unchangeable at grass roots level.
Home based
There is the home based care team, for instance. UK charities help fund a diocesan project for the chronically sick in Lusaka. In Lilanda, this means supporting around 70 volunteers, mostly AIDS widows themselves, who distribute soap, mealie meal and occasionally funds to get a patient to the clinic.
The funding for the project - as for every other activity in the parish - is never enough, so the Combonis came up with the idea of developing a plot of land for the parish.
Father Dario along with Fr Juanmanuel Valdovinos, who has now gone home to work in Mexico, saw the value of enabling parishioners to feed themselves, raise funds and simply escape from their stifling township lives.
With parish council and Comboni funds, they paid US$5000 for some unpromising land. What started out as “the plot” when it was bought in 1997 has become dignified with the name of St Joseph’s Community Development Center.
Comboni supporters around the world and the Japanese Embassy in Lusaka have helped the field of dreams progress.
In 1999, women from the home based care team cleared the land with hoes and machetes. Today, they are reaping a cash crop of sugar cane worth over US$750 to improve the care of families affected by HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, heart disease, cancer and stroke.
Community
There are buildings for worship and meetings, a playing field for the kids and a place for parish families to grow food. There’s a bore hole for clean water, a caretaker’s house and even electricity on site.
Most exciting of all, perhaps, is the community school for orphans. Because of AIDS, four out of 10 Zambian children are expected to be orphaned by the year 2010. Lilanda is no exception and this Comboni-inspired school is already providing primary education for around 50 children.
The teachers are Zambian volunteers and between money raised from crops on the plot and gifts from donors, they are able to give the children a meal to supplement the meager diet the grannies and aunties who look after them can afford.
In 2001, the first Zambian Comboni priest was ordained and there is a new seminary in Lusaka where young men from all over the African continent are training.
Although they still only reach the tip of the iceberg, Lilanda parishioners are being empowered by the mission to solve the worst problems in their community.
Now Fr Dario says he wants to work himself out of a job, following Daniel Comboni’s example of saving Africa through Africans.
GUATEMALA
Hope For The World
VAST POSSIBILITIES AND GREAT CHALLENGES
CAM 2, the 2nd American Mission Congress held recently in Guatemala City, was the first major missionary event in the third millennium. In this interview, Comboni Missionary Bishop Vittorino Girardi of Tilaran in Costa Rica, one of the main speakers, shares his insights.
Q. Bishop Girardi, what does it mean to be a missionary today?
A. It means making a radical commitment to obey the Lord's twofold command: "Love one another as I have loved you… As the Father has sent me so I send you".
Christ commands us to love in his style of total, unconditioned self-giving, even to the offering of life, and he calls us to make his mission our own. I think that these two "as I" are the basis and meaning of our missionary efforts. To be a missionary today means to cry with Saint Paul: "Woe to me if I did not preach the Gospel".
Moreover the moment of history in which we
live makes our missionary commitment more intense: this is a time of vast
possibilities for missionary activity (think for example of the means of
social communications at our disposal) and the great
challenge the urgent need for evangelization.
Unexpectedly new fields of mission have
opened up: for example, Mongolia and China,
while others (Africa and South America) keep calling for more missionaries.
Not to mention the challenges of inter-religious dialogue, the encounter, at
times painful, of different cultures, and the need to accompany young people
on their journey of integral development.
Q. What indications did CAM 2 offer for mission?
A. The Congress called for a missionary approach to influence all areas of the local Churches’ life, and it encouraged and fostered numerous missionary vocations ad gentes, ad intra and ad extra, so that missionary activity is no longer neglected and forgotten.
In Latin America our responsibilities are all the greater considering that almost half the world's Catholics live here. We are aware that this is in open and scandalous contrast with the only 1.5% of missionaries ad gentes offered today by our Churches.
We see an authentic reawakening of missionary awareness, but it is still insufficient. CAM2 was undoubtedly an important lap on the journey in growth in ever more lively mission awareness.
Preparation for the Congress involved the best apostolic agents in our local Churches, especially during 2003, which declared the Bishops of Central America declared a "Holy Year of Mission ".
Q. Is it possible a similar mission congress for Africa or Asia?
A. I am more familiar with the Church in Africa because I was engaged in the apostolate there for four and a half years and I visited many African countries. I think that for Africa a continental Mission Congress is not only possible, but it is also to be encouraged in view of developing mission awareness in those young Churches, from the outset.
A Brazilian Bishop was right when he made this opportune observation some years ago: "Latin America has received great missionaries, but they did not teach us to be missionaries". The missionary reawakening of our continent is a recent fact, and it was not easy to get used to. We would not like to see Africa arrive late, as we did.
With regard to Asia, my opinion is not so clear cut: in Asia distances are enormous, language differences multiple and the Catholic presence is not numerically significant. Therefore I would see Regional Mission Congresses to be more useful.
Q. In your experience, how should local Churches go about increasing their sense of mission?
A. One aspect not to be overlooked is that all missionary efforts must present Christianity and establish a local Church which from the beginning feels it is missionary.
We must admit that, especially for Latin America, living centuries waiting for the arrival of missionaries from other countries delayed its Christian and missionary development: in fact, the local Churches considered themselves objects of evangelization and they were little inclined to develop their missionary responsibility. We would not want to see this experience repeated in the Churches of Africa or Asia.
However I must say that some Churches in Asia, despite small numbers, have already borne extraordinary and numerous fruits of authentic missionary spirit, for example South Korea, India and the Philippines.
Another aspect to underline is the need for encounters between bishops, priests, religious men and women, committed laity - in other words the living forces of mission. This is an extraordinary mutual enrichment which is positive for our local Churches, not only with regard to missionary activity but for all the commitments of our ecclesial communities.
A third aspect is the need for theological re-thinking and the urgent need to coordinate the numerous missiologists of our continent and to form an Association of Catholic Missiologists . It is taking its first steps and already producing fruit. This month in San Jose de Costa Rica there will be a meeting of many American missiologists which will certainly be of benefit for our local Churches. Our dream is that our Continent of Hope, as Pope John Paul II calls it, will soon become the Continent of Missionary Hope for the whole world. FIDES
ZIMBABWE
Getting His Wish
by Philip Drake
MARTYR WHO FOUND LIFE THROUGH DEATH
Philip Drake looks at John Bradburne, who was murdered in Zimbabwe in 1979. He was 58 years old and for most of his life he had been trying to discover how God wanted him to live.
John Bradburne was born in 1921, the son of an Anglican minister serving at that time in Cumbria, England. John attended an English private school and served as an army officer in Malaya, India and Burma during the Second World War. It was in India that he first met Fr Dove SJ who at that time was also a serving officer. During the War he became interested in the spiritual life and began to explore Catholicism.
After the war he was drawn to work at Buckfast Benedictine Abbey and became a Catholic. For the next twenty years he lived in complete poverty trying to discover God’s plan for his life. He traveled penniless in Europe and the Holy Land and tried his vocation with monastic orders including the Benedictines and the Carthusians. He could not find a way of blending love of contemplative solitude with his love for the poor.
In 1962, he contacted Fr Dove who was by this time a Jesuit missionary in Zimbabwe. Fr Dove arranged for John to join a missionary station and in fact he worked briefly in several missions without finding his role.
Vocation
Still dissatisfied about his vocation in life, John returned to the Holy Land but was soon made aware that his vocation lay in Africa. He returned to Zimbabwe and one day was taken by a friend to visit a nearby leper colony - Mutemwa (which means “I am cut off”). As soon as John had seen the lepers, he knew what his mission was. What has been called his “First Wish” was to work with lepers.
John was a man of contradictions: a soldier who hated war, a musician and a poet who wrote fine poems. Yet he was a man who wanted to live the life of a recluse in total poverty.
But at the same time he made deep friendships. He was loved and respected by those who knew him. And he had a great love for the poor whom he wanted to help. How could all these contrasting qualities be brought together in the role that he believed God had prepared for him?
Loving care
The answer was: Mutemwa. Leprosy had been a terrible disease feared throughout the world. Mutemwa at one time housed over a thousand lepers, isolated in a life of suffering. By the 1960s new drugs treated leprosy and this colony now only housed about one hundred old, badly disabled lepers, many of whom came from other African countries. Not only were they shunned because of the disease; they were resented by the local people. In 1969 the Jesuits began to assist the colony and John Bradburne was invited to become the warden. He agreed and thus began an astonishing phase of his life.
Although untrained in medicine or administration, he gave the patients what they really needed at that time: loving care. He gave them back their human dignity. He bathed them, gave them their drugs, and treated their wounds and sores. He managed to get a little chapel built through friend, and the lepers were able to worship God in the midst of their sufferings. John lived among them in total poverty. If he was given gifts of food or clothes they were passed on to the patients.
Enemies
John also defended the leper colony against all attacks and in doing this he made enemies. The Jesuit member of the management committee left for other reasons, and the committee became humanist and bureaucratic. John was told to cut the patients’ allowance for food and medicine and he refused. He was also told to put numbers round their necks and he refused to do this. In the end he was sacked as warden. However he continued to live in a hut just outside the colony and continued to care for the lepers secretly at night. Finally he was allowed to enter the colony again officially.
But John was warned that he was in danger. This was the time of warfare between Robert Mugabe’s guerrillas and the Rhodesian forces. John was resented by the local villagers and when the guerrillas entered the area they were told that John was secretly passing information to the Rhodesians. However, he refused to leave for safety because that would mean leaving his beloved lepers to the mercy of humanistic bureaucrats.
Cures and conversions
His acceptance of the danger of death has been called his “Second Wish”: to die as a martyr. His “Third Wish” was to be buried in his habit of the Franciscan Third Order. Both of these wishes were soon to be fulfilled.
On Sunday, 2 September 1979, guerrillas came for John. He was taken to isolated caves where the guerrillas camped and was humiliated and “tried” in a kangaroo court. He was offered the chance to go with the guerrillas to Mozambique but refused, saying he would not leave his leprosy patients. He was released, but on Wednesday, 5 September, on his way back to Mutemwa, he was shot dead. He was found by the roadside by Fr David Gibbs who had been searching for him.
John Bradburne’s Requiem was on 10 September. At the Mass, just after Communion, eyewitnesses saw three drops of blood fall from the coffin and form a single little pool underneath. After the Requiem, the coffin was opened to investigate. No blood was found but one of the sisters saw that he had been buried in a shirt, not the Franciscan habit as he had wished. He was dressed again in his habit and his Third Wish was fulfilled.
Since John Bradburne’s death, many strange incidents have been recorded, including claims of cures and spiritual conversions. Mutemwa has now become a place of pilgrimage and 15,000 people are expected to visit the settlement this September, the 24th anniversary of his death. The John Bradburne Memorial Society now raises funds for the Leprosy Settlement at Mutemwa.
EAST
TIMOR
A Challenge Of Faith
WORLD’S YOUNGEST COUNTRY FACES ITS FUTURE
President Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao of the Republic of East Timor talks about his Christian faith and the task ahead.
It is hard not to bring some preconceptions to an interview with President Kay Rala Xanana Gusmao of the Republic of East Timor. Not only does he have the honor of being first citizen of the world's newest nation, but amongst his people there is almost universal admiration for his past role as figurehead of the country's independence struggle, as well as for his current role as the people's "eyes, ears and mouth".
Epic struggle
Much has been written over the years on the "epic" struggle of the people of East Timor to free themselves from Indonesia's oppressive twenty-four year occupation which saw up to 200,000 Timorese lose their lives through violence or famine. Just over a year into their history as a fully-fledged independent state, the challenges facing East Timor are monumental but in the view of some, not insurmountable. Combating its dire poverty is the number one challenge.
Making the transition from a colonized people to a fully democratic society guaranteeing the rights and needs of the nation is a process which can't be achieved overnight. President Gusmao's own transformation from "poet warrior" to statesman can to some degree be seen to mirror the transition the country itself has made.
Gusmao, who hails from the town of Manatuto, where his father was a primary school teacher, was the second of nine children, spent four years in a minor seminary from the age of eleven. By 1974, the year of the Portuguese withdrawal, his political leanings were Marxist and he joined the Fretilin political party. Following the Indonesian invasion, he became a guerrilla commander with Fretilin's armed wing, Falantil. Despite the apparent rupture with the Church in the 1970s which saw him marry his first wife in a registry office, he readily admits these days to being a Catholic. His marriage to his second wife was a church ceremony and he stood for president as an independent candidate.
Building society
The 57-year-old admits that for the immediate future, East Timor will remain heavily dependent on international aid and subsidies to help bolster its weak economy. "In the short-term we still face difficulties but I foresee a bright future", President Gusmao says. "A bright future if we can build the right foundations". Those foundations must involve "building respect for human dignity, commitment to democratic values and the development of democratic institutions."
In President Gusmao's opinion, building civic society isn't just about creating the institutions and providing the buildings: "it is about giving people the chance to talk about their own development and not having to rely on decisions from central government. Being able to make decisions at community level by themselves."
State and Church
For this president, his biggest challenge of faith is bringing about an accommodation between state and Church that will benefit East Timorese society and its people. "We have already realized that the state alone cannot deal with the many challenges we face. We must involve the Church." President Gusmao has consistently advocated a role for the Catholic Church in East Timor's future, undoubtedly due to the profoundly important role it played in the country's independence struggle.
He envisages some sort of consensus or social agreement evolving between state, Church and civil society to "build our nation." "Very recently I started to raise the issues of a social agreement between the state and the church in helping to form the character of our people, especially our young people. We have a population of 800,000 of which fifty-four percent is under 20 years of age. We must not only educate them but mould their character."
Principle of freedom
However while paying tribute to the Church's role in the past in providing education to the East Timorese and his concern that they should be involved in the future, he is anxious to dispel any notion that he is seeking to establish a clerical state along the line of Iran. "We have our identity in religion but we must also keep a separation of the Church and state".
He explains that although East Timor is well over ninety percent Catholic, there is a small percentage of Protestants as well as a small number of Muslims, including the country's prime minister, Mari Alkatiri. "We would like to state the principle of freedom of religion and Church - that is why sometimes at meetings we invite representatives of all the faiths. We don't want the Muslims and Protestants to feel they don't have a voice."
Since his release from prison in 1999, Gusmao has carefully promoted a culture of reconciliation, even offering the hand of friendship to Indonesia. He says his commitment to reconciliation is born of his Catholic faith, his philosophy as well as his belief that if East Timor is to move forward, the people must not become entrapped in a cycle of recriminations.
Sarah Macdonald