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Handicapped children didn’t “exist” in China up to recently. Orphanages were forbidden. But some Sisters defied the official policy and the stern authorities and made the most excluded of the children, the handicapped, part of their family. They call it the Liming Family, which means, dawn and giving hope.
A medical doctor and a surgeon by profession, Rosario Iannetti joined the Comboni Missionaries as a Brother in 1992. He has been working in South Sudan, Africa’s newest country, for the last 15 years. Since 2002, he has been in Mapuordit, where he transformed the small mission dispensary into a hospital with more than 100 beds. He says that “medicine is a great weapon to show the love of God for people, which is the basic element of the announcement of the Good News.”
What I truly believe is that all those who are sincerely committed to solve this conflict in Karamoja (Uganda) are, in a way, “baptized people,” even though they have never been really baptized and most likely will never be. I like to call this gift “the baptism of peace!”
A network of “barefoot lawyers,” pioneered by a remarkable Indian Jesuit, has brought dignity and freedom to India’s downtrodden tribal people. Says Fr. Stanny Jebamalai about India’s religious apartheid: “The caste system, conceived 2,000 years before Christ, may be the most devilish human invention ever.”
Tony Meloto, 61, is perhaps the most inspiring living Filipino. After a personal and family renewal in Couples for Christ, he made a life-changing faith experience in a Metro Manila slum. He founded Gawad Kalinga (KG) as an expression of his faith and love for the poor. They have built, so far, around 200,000 houses, made 2,000 communities for the poor and they set a nation-building style that is being followed even by the national government. Meloto believes that, through all the efforts of those who love the country, the Philippines will be out of poverty by 2024. He states: “I am a radical optimist because I believe in Jesus Christ.”
Everyone has heard about Gandhi, but almost no one knows Abdul Ghaffar Khan. Coming from Pakistan and Afghanistan, he fought for peace and justice with the power of active nonviolence for more than eighty years – and did it all because of his Muslim faith.
Life is beautiful. Yes, it is really beautiful… because God is the lover who is madly in love with the poor, the weak and with our frail humanity.
Father Fabio Gilli, 75, is a visually-impaired Italian Comboni missionary. He became blind when he was in his mid-30’s. Blindness made him find a new light and opened the eyes of his heart to the reality of the blind of Togo. He returned to the country where he had previously worked and dedicated his life to this newly-found mission. Two centers and two clinics are the visible signs of his care for the neglected blind.
Here in Kenya, around this time, you also see the odd Santa Claus and plastic Christmas trees, mostly in the big shopping malls of the larger cities. But they look totally out of place in the heat of the Equator. I am looking forward, with some longing, to the day when Africa will develop its own Christmas traditions and proudly show them to the world. But that will probably take centuries. Our own Christmas ‘staples,’ after all, do not date from the first century of Christianization of our countries either.
Bishop Giuseppe Franzelli of Lira (Uganda), a Comboni Missionary, admits that it is hard to know where to start when working with children who have been forcibly turned into soldiers and assassins. The priority is helping child soldiers but also refugees sent to terribly crowded camps to restart their lives, and rebuilding people “from within.” He adds: “In the camps, there is a high rate of suicide not only among the elderly, who were desperate that they could no longer go back to their ancestral home, but also among the young.”
