SIGN UP FOR THE IMPACT UPDATE
Monthly updates connecting you with people and places around the world where our missionaries make an impact.
Sign UpIMPACT ON
POVERTY:
Divine Word Missionaries Live Among the Impoverished
Our feeding programs, medical centers, and shelters attempt to help people get the basic necessities they need to survive.
Our lessons in sustainable agriculture, microloan programs, and educational opportunities attempt to help people breakout of the misery of crushing poverty and into more stable living conditions with economic potential.
In 2014, Fr. Anthony Amissah SVD started a weekly feeding program through his Divine Word parish in an attempt to support the street children and elderly of Kayole, Kenya who live lives of desperate poverty.
The feeding program’s goal is to meet the material needs of the young and elderly while treating them with great dignity and fostering hope. The ages of the participants of this weekly feeding program range from 6 to 98. Many of the people who are served food are suffering from physical ailments. They live in homes made from cardboard boxes with leaking rooftops and dirt floors, with old and young sleeping on old rags.
But every Saturday, between 160 and 180 street children, homeless families, and elderly people come to the church compound to eat a healthy, balanced meal. They know that they are safe with us and they feel loved and wanted.
The whole Catholic parish community works together to support this feeding program.
Learn more about our work spreading the Word of God.
In the slums of the central Indian city of Indore even the youngest children have to work.
A 9-year-old girl named Puja is one of these children. Labor in the brickyards has left her hands dry and cracked. Every morning Puja and her grandmother get up very early . After a few quick bites of breakfast, the old woman and the girl set off for the brickworks at first light. Work starts at about four in the morning.
In this area of Indore, Divine Word Missionaries are making it possible for children like Puja to get their first steps in education through “bridge schools.” To assist older residents, microloans are available to help them start small businesses. Bridge schools and microloans will break young and old free of the cycle of poverty and liberate them from a lifetime of demeaning jobs and living in squalor.
Build a person’s future by supporting our missionary efforts to lift people out of poverty around the world.
Located in Puri in the Indian state of Odisha, the Karunalaya Leprosy Care Centre was founded in 1975 by the late Father Marian Zelazek SVD to provide clean housing, food, education, healthcare and social integration to people who to this day are considered “untouchables.”
As the Indian government has closed many of its leprosy centers, ours remains the only one in the vicinity dedicated to and specializing in the care of leprosy patients, now providing housing to 1,000 people. The centerpiece of our healthcare mission at Karunalaya is the 22-bed, short-stay hospital where leprosy patients can be admitted for treatment. Because many of our patients are not accepted at other hospitals, they can also find care for general illnesses here.
Besides medicines for leprosy, we also supply the more common medicines: antibiotics, cough syrup, vitamin tablets and painkillers. We also stock baby food for infants in our care. No hospital is complete without a laboratory. Here, pathology work and tests to detect disease are constantly in demand. Our bandaging and dressing room is always busy as well.
Fr. Marian began a mission of solidarity with the most outcast and vulnerable people of India. Today, we proudly carry on and grow his mission, fighting the battle against this dreaded disease and the stigma it carries.
On March 14, 2019, the intense Cyclone Idai made landfall in Mozambique, right near Beira, a port city of 500,000 people. Over the next few days, this storm dumped catastrophic amounts of water on the area, causing widespread flooding, death and devastation. Some aid agencies have estimated that 90 percent of the area was destroyed.
Flattened homes, impassable roads, no electricity, families separated, food and medical shortages — it's difficult to capture the immensity of the crisis in Mozambique and other surrounding countries in southeastern Africa caused by Idai.
Current estimates put the fatalities at over 1,000, and many people engaged in relief work think this number is far lower than the reality of those who have been lost.
Our missionaries have already distributed food items for approximately 500 people. They are now gathering more resources to help even more individuals.
The Divine Word parish community of São Francisco Xavier in Beira formed a volunteer team called “Activists of Charity” with 12 volunteers from six communities. The team reviews and assesses the needs in the communities to identify destitute people such as widows, the abandoned, the sick and the elderly who have no one to help them.
We hope you have enjoyed learning more about the realities of poverty and the work that Divine Word Missionaries are doing to tackle the challenge of poverty.
We all know that the challenge of poverty can be intimidating. There are so many people who are suffering in inhumane living conditions. But we also know that we are called to be a part of the solution.
When people have access to basic needs — food, medical care, shelter — they have the opportunity to thrive and grow into the people they are created to be. Our brothers and sisters in poverty need our empathy and material support.
Join Mission Impact and support the work of Divine Word Missionaries for the hungry, the homeless, the suffering and the marginalized.
Want to connect with us and stay up-to-date on stories from the mission field?
Mailing Address:
P.O. Box 6099
Techny, Illinois
60082-6099
© 2024 Divine Word Missionaries