Message and News, End of the Year 2012

 October 25^th 2012

        Dear friends and benefactors,

        Here comes the time to offer you some news! I do hope that you are well and that this finishing year 2012 has been kind to you. 

        Presently, I am still serving the rural parish of Kasamwa, within the area of Mwanza, in Tanzania. I just started my fourth year in this place, and this is the first time ever I have been residing in a same place for so long! However, daily life is not at all monotonous!

        At the beginning of June 2012, the priest in charge of the parish has left for an assignment in the lands of Mexico, and he left me with the responsibility of the whole parish. Fairly enough, I cannot say that I was not prepared for this, but still, it is an important change and charge. He left me in the company of a young Congolese priest, Jean-Pierre who reached the mission at the beginning of the year, and also Colins, a young seminarian from Malawi who is discerning a brother vocation within our congregation. Together, we organise various activities. Further changes of personnel are taking place and at the end of this year we have the joy to welcome Jan, an elder Dutch priest aged 78 and Matheusz, a Polish seminarian aged 26. Besides, a niece of mine expressed her will to have an extended stay in Africa and should reach us very soon! She is welcome!

        Of all our activities, the most visible is certainly the building of our main church. It is a big one which will be supposed to contain almost a thousand places, but whose structure remains rather simple. Foundations have been made by June and now we are doing the walling, which should be of about six metres high. We do hope to be able to roof this church within the next few months, but for the remaining (doors, windows, paint etc.) we will have to rely on Saint Joseph! Our parishioners do contribute very generously to this project, but their means remain limited. It is to be noticed that at the beginning of September, a grand scale collection took place in the parish which succeeded to gather about the equivalent of 10,000 Euros, which is in itself a great achievement! It is clear that this Church will serve as a place of gathering and meeting for various conferences, seminaries or courses which will be organized by the parish.

                  Kasamwa, building of the main Church, mid-October 2013

        Besides, we should not forget that within almost all our thirty communities some churches are being built, according to available means. Sometimes it is nothing more than a fragile shelter, sometimes it is a nicely built chapel. These various buildings always express a desire from our communities to strengthen its means to meet Christ and to organize the Church.

                                           Above, Mukoba Church, February 2012

                                           Bung'wangoko Church, February 2012

        Slowly, an awareness programme on Justice and Peace issues is being put into place within the parish. Tanzania has launched a great debate on a possible change of the constitution, and the contribution from our faithful is needed so that Tanzania may retain solid social foundations allowing a positive and constructive presence of the Church. Besides, we are now linked with a professional lawyer who occasionally meet our faithful in order to enlighten them about situations of corruptions or intimidations from which they are sometimes victims. Among the most urgent issues: how to face, what to do in order to fight corruption? What to do when someone is accused of witchcraft? How to obtain the documentation which is necessary to secure land ownership? Questions about land become particularly urgent. What are the means available to us so that we may successfully fight against domestic violence?

        The usual pastoral work is going on, with for instance the regular visitation of each of our thirty villages. We do our best to visit each of our community at least once every two months. This year, marriages have been very few, and some think that this is caused by a poor harvest: it is difficult to separate marriage from its feast, and quite simply, many have not the means to afford it. Baptisms and confirmations are more stable, but we do reflect about ways to improve their preparations. Our youth are a permanent concern. Our parish has no less than five secondary schools and more than forty primary schools. Theoretically, we are requested to visit all these schools at least once a week in order to provide Catholic education to pupils and students. But in fact, we simply do not have enough pastoral agents nor financial means to support them so that to offer this service with its necessary regularity. We also have about eighty small Christian communities, and each of these is organized in order to allow each member to take his or her full place in the community. Families are another great pastoral concern which we will have to consider with more energy in the future. This year, we initiated meetings and gatherings to prepare people to the sacrament of marriage, but this is not enough to fight the disintegration of families which is taking place everywhere by now. We do organize regular gatherings for catechists and pastoral agents and we equip them for their various tasks. 

         In 2010, I completed a collection of traditional stories related to the Sukuma ethnic group with a book in Swahili language of 168 pages. This year, I have just completed another project which is a sequel of the first one: a collection of almost a thousand proverbs originating from 9 different ethnic groups, all of them located in the same North-Western part of Tanzania, around the great Lake Victoria. This book of 238 pages is the fruit of many years of research is also compiled in the Swahili language. Some French and English translations have been made but have not been printed so far. It is very unfortunate that my collaborator in this work, Catechist Joseph Nkumbulwa died just a few weeks before the release of this book.

        Besides these activities, I am also participating for more than a year into the organisation of certain issues related to the congregation of the Missionaries of Africa. The North-Western part of Tanzania has more than twenty missionaries scattered within five different dioceses. It is sometimes needed for me to visit them and to occasionally organise and animate gatherings.

        Tanzania is a stable, peaceful country, and it is always a miracle in itself. However, violent robberies are still taking place. Besides, Tanzania is also victim of an economic crisis, mainly due to international factors and two consecutive bad climatic years. Inflation was above 10 % last year but growth rate is still above 6 %. Young people easily join opposition parties, and the 2015 elections are promising great changes, and it is very difficult to predict how the party in power for more than fifty years will react.

        But for now, and this will be my dearest wish for each of us in this end of the year, may ‘Christ dwell in our heart through faith, in such a way that we may be rooted and built on Love’ (Ephesians, 3:17). So, our various contributions would not remain vain efforts and we would have participated and worked, each according to his or her own gifts, towards a better society.

        Merry Christmas and Happy New Year 2013!

        Pascal

Pascal Durand                   E-Mail: pascalbcd@yahoo.fr
Missionnaries of Africa       Tel: +255 783 07 89 85 (Tanzania)
Kasamwa Parish                Tel: +255 753 01 87 66 (Tanzania)
P. O. Box 475 Geita           www.pascalbcdeng.over-blog.com

Tanzania