SALESIAN SPEAKS TO NEW ZEALANDERS ON AFRICAN PROBLEMS
(as reported by Peter Grace of NZ Catholic)
AUCKLAND: 5th March -- Central Africa has many problems, but the one thing they have in common is poverty, says a priest from Kenya, Fr. Glenford Lowe SDB.
Fr Lowe, who was in New Zealand last month, is the director of a youth ministry programme based at Karen, in Kenya. He said his Order, the Salesians, had 28 institutions and about 152 members in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and The Sudan.
Fr. Lowe is the director of Don Bosco Youth Educational Services. The Order also works with streetkids, refugees, and AIDS victims and their families.
Girls were often bought for a certain number of cows "so that part of our work is telling them 'you are worth much more than that'."
Nairobi had more than 100,000 street children, so they had a programme taking children off the street. Some of them ended up going home.
A large camp, Kaa Kuma, had about 80,000 refugees, mostly from South Sudan. "We have got three vocational training schools in the camp."
Aids was a big problem, but the Church was trying to deal with that through behaviour chnage programmes.
"Unemployment is very high." Life expectancy was about 47-48 years. "Poverty is the basic thing....from there everything else has expanded." For young people in Africa "there's no hope; everything is so dark."
Part of youth ministry was helping young people to find God in their everyday lives. "We call them to be people of prayer, and basically of prayer that brings them back to life so they can be in communion with the Church." That may lead them into action for social justice.
Aids was a big problem. In Uganda a few years ago a nun started a Youth Life Movement programme there, "It basically was proposing a behavioural chnage programme, and that picked up very much."
Now, 13 to 15 years later, Uganda's incidence of Aids had fallen, where elsewhere, without such programmes, it had got worse. "Another thing that's picking up among young people is the True Love Waits campaign."
Aids was discussed quite openly in Kenya and Uganda, but that was not the case in Tanzania and The Sudan.
Fr. Lowe is from India, where has was ordained in 1988. About one third of the Salesian priests in Central Africa were now locals, he said.
Despite the many problems, the people were very warm and welcoming, he said.
