Maryknoll Founders in Africa

Establishing the Tanzania Catholic Secretariat
by Kevin Dargan

In 1953 the Catholic Hierarchy was established in the “then” Tanganyika and the Catholic vicariates became dioceses. The Tanganyika Catholic Welfare Organization or TCWO (in the original draft “conference” was used rather than “organization”) was formed in 1956 with six departments. In early 1958 Monsignor Gerard Grondin moved from Musoma to Dar es Salaam and started work in an office at Kurasini as the first Secretary General of the Tanganyika Catholic Welfare Organization.

This eventually became the Tanganyika (later Tanzania) Episcopal Conference headquarters. Brother Brian Fraher was assigned from Musoma Diocese in September, 1960 to aid the Jerry Grondin (recovering from sickness) in this work. The two of them labored for nearly two years when Grondin was elected to the Maryknoll General Council in June, 1962. Then Father Del Robinson was assigned to the Tanganyika Episcopal Conference as Secretary General.

Over these years they helped to set up the organizational structure of the now Tanzania Catholic Secretariat in Dar es Salaam with its various departments and commissions. The Tanzanian structure was based on the National Catholic Welfare Conference (NCWC) of the Catholic Bishops in the U.S.A. This in turn was the model used in setting up the chancery offices and other departments in various dioceses in Tanzania.

During the period 1963-65 Robinson accompanied the Tanzanian bishops to Rome for the Second Vatican Council. During these years the Fall Plenary Meetings of the TEC were held in Rome in October. Del contributed his many organizational and coordinating skills as well as a broad vision of church. He was definitely the right man at the right time for laying a firm foundation.

In November, 1964 the first Religious Superiors meeting was held in Dar es Salaam. There was praise for Brother Brian's work at the residence for bishops at Kurasini. In 1966 Del was elected a delegate of the “then” Africa Region to the Fifth General Chapter of the Maryknoll Society. Then he was elected to the General Council. The TEC work continued with Father William Collins and Brian. Both men left the work in the early 1970s.

 

Ukweli Video Productions Plus…
By Dick Quinn

EDITOR'S NOTE: Dick Quinn's contributions to East Africa (and especially his personal experience stories) are legendary. Here are just a few of his “founding” exploits (with the founding dates in brackets):

1. Founder of the Kiagata Parish plot, Musoma Diocese, Tanzania (1959).
2. Founder of Mara Jazz Band, Tanzania (1965).
3. Co-founder of Kebirigo Parish. Kisii Diocese, Kenya (1972).
4. Founder of Viongozi Senta also called Keberigo Pastoral Center that was probably the first Pastoral Center in East Africa, Kisii Diocese, Kenya (1974).
5. Founder of Ukweli Video Productions that celebrated its 25th Anniversary in May, 2006. Total of 272 productions up to December, 2006 (1981).
6. Spiritual Director of John Paul II Evangelizing Parish Teams (1992).
7. Writer of pamphlet, Who Are Stealing Our Sheep? (Nairobi: Pauline Publications Africa, 1998).
8. Co-writer of book, New Evangelization in Africa (Nairobi: Pauline Publications Africa, 2005).
 

 

Starting the AMECEA Social Communications Office in Nairobi
By Joseph Healey

In 1967 AMECEA (Association of the Catholic Bishops Conferences in Eastern Africa) asked the Maryknoll Society for a trained journalist. I was assigned to the “then” Maryknoll Africa Region and went to Nairobi, Kenya in July, 1968. First, I made two social communications surveys on the African continent. Then I officially started the AMECEA Social Communications Office in Nairobi in January, 1969. Our main task was running communications training programs and workshops (journalism, broadcasting and audio-visual media) in the countries of Kenya, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. My baptism by fire came when I coordinated the Press Office for the visit of Pope Paul VI to Uganda in July, 1969. From 1969–1974 I served as Editor of AMECEA Communications and coordinated the press office during various Regional and Continental Bishops Meetings. In 1974 after a successful counterpart training program, I handed over my office to Father Joseph Mukwaya, a Ugandan priest. This was a dream come true. The heart of the missionary vocation is to initiate, train, hand over and move on.
 

 

Once Upon a Time in Nairobi
By John Wymes

Once upon a time in Nairobi a group of interested people decided to try and start a counseling service that became the Amani Counseling Center. They felt it would fulfill a real felt need, for they saw this need in their daily contact with friends and neighbors.

At the beginning of this creation in 1972, there were myself, Chaplain at Mathers Mental Hospital, and two Christian women who were being supervised by me for credit toward their Counseling Degree from the University of California where they had made their preliminary studies. They had asked if I would be an acceptable supervisor. Mrs. Stafford and Mrs. Hirsch were in Kenya with their husbands: Tim Stafford was teaching at a local Christian College and now is a senior writer for Christianity Today. Mr. Hirsch was in East Africa representing World Vision. Even the new Attorney General of Kenya and his wife were with us as was an African journalist and European teacher of a local college.

We got a grant from Maryknoll for which we were grateful. We ourselves cleaned and painted some rooms in the Catholic Bishops building in Westlands and began working. Eventually an Israeli psychologist joined us; her husband was with the embassy. As did a retired teacher from Stony Brook University in Long Island. Maryknoll Sister Bernice Rigney later joined. I was gone by that time. The enthusiasm of all concerned is what made it grow to where it is today.
 

 

Sudan Unit: A Word on Beginnings
By John Conway

In 1975 the Maryknoll Society made a decision to reach beyond the existing apostolates, structures and geographies. It established Units. In Africa, Sudan was chosen as a realization of this Society vision. Fathers Bill Knipe, Tom Mantica and John Conway were assigned with Maryknoll Sisters Ruth Greble and Lucy Fandel as a collaborative response to ministerial needs especially in the Southern Sudan where expatriate missioners were expelled in 1964 leaving a missionary vacuum. For Maryknoll in Africa it was the entrance into the Arab world of language and culture and the opportunity for significant contact with Islam in Africa. The pastoral invitation was to participate in, and develop, a national pastoral and catechetical institute.

As well as the original effort, there was a later surge of the Maryknoll's Society presence in El Obeid with Fathers Joe Glynn, Dick Baker and Tom Tiscornia. Maryknoll Lay Missioners Liz Mach, Susan Nagele and Marj Humphrey followed the lead of the Society and Congregation. Although presently there are no Society Members or Lay Missioners living in the Sudan, the Maryknoll Sisters continue their educational and health care apostolates in Southern Sudan.
 

 

Clinical Pastoral Education Program at BMC in Mwanza
By John Eybel

Clinical Pastoral Education at Bugando Medical Center (BMC) was founded by the Tanzania Episcopal Conference (TEC) in 1984. The program is governed by a board, the chairman of which is Bishop Aloysius Balina, the Chairman of the TEC Medical Department. Since its founding this program has been “supervised” by Father John Eybel who will leave in June, 2007 for a new Maryknoll assignment. Over 500 priests, religious, seminarians (often in pastoral year), and parish or healthcare workers from Tanzania have completed 16 weeks of professional education for ministry.

Students reflect theologically on specific human situations. Here is an example. One priest in CPE, assigned to a gynecology ward at BMC, visited a woman who was being treated for VVF (vesico-vaginal fistula), an embarrassing condition in which she leaked her urine uncontrollably after a problematic stillbirth. The patient, also paralyzed below the waist, had to spend most of her time miserably lying in her urine soaked bed until which time a nurse could manage to change the sheets again. She told the priest that “God wanted her in that condition” as a punishment. After attending to her guilt the priest reflected with his colleagues in CPE on what other Good News there might be for his patient whose God was looking on from a distance satisfied that his punishment was taking its course. With the fruits of the reflection he revealed another face of God for this woman to choose and believe in. It was the face of the incarnate God whose Spirit was in fact with her in her bed of urine and whose power was enabling her to get along “miserably” until the nurse could attend to her again. The priest prayed with his patient to thank God whose power was exercised not so much from a distance as from within.

This 16-week course of “action and reflection” learning integrates pastoral theology with clearly identified communication skills, social science theories of personality and human development, and pastoral issues such as ministering to patients with AIDS.
The mission vision of CPE at BMC is to be Christ present with those who are suffering and to those who are ministering to them. Where the power of God seems to inflict suffering from a distance we see that the power of God enables his people to survive their pain from within. Where the weak judge themselves unfavorably from the standpoint of human weakness and doubt, we see that God chooses the weak as instruments of grace and virtue.

 

Launching the African Proverbs Website in Nairobi
By Joseph Healey

After producing The Wisdom of African Proverbs CD (the equivalent of over 75 printed books) and various printed books of African proverbs and sayings (in collaboration with Fathers Don Sybertz, George Cotter and others), we wanted to enter the world of the Internet. Together with the Rev. John Shane, a Protestant Minister and Director of the Urban Ministries Support Group (UMSG) in Nairobi, Kenya we launched the African Proverbs, Sayings and Stories Website with a registered Internet Domain (www.afriprov.org) in May, 1998.

This became an ecumenical web project to promote the use of African oral literature in the spread of the Gospel. A major feature is the "African Proverb of the Month" that presently has come from 80 different languages in 40 different African countries. Our website is updated every week and gets about 300 hits a day. I continue as the Moderator based in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The Assistant Moderator is Joseph Kariuki based in Nairobi, Kenya. The Administrator is Nicholas Adongo based in Manhattan, Kansas, U.S.A. The website host is Sam Wanyoike based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Now that's internationalization! In September, 2006 we celebrated the 100th "African Proverb of the Month" in an online Chat Room Party involving people from six different countries around the world.
 

 

Wahudumu wa Afya in Mombasa
By John Mullen

When assigned to Mombasa in 1996 I began ministry to the sick in Bomu Parish. After receiving permission of the pastor Father Joseph Oketch, AJ, I met with the parish council and explained that I would like each Small Christian Community (SCC) to choose two volunteers who were trustworthy (to protect confidentiality), had the desire to serve their sick neighbors and were available during the workweek to accompany a nurse to visit the sick.

12 women were chosen. After a period of training, I met each volunteer in her home each week and she accompanied me to meet people with various health problems in the area of her SCC. I evaluated problems and gave the sick person advice or referred them to a government health facility. In many cases I treated the person’s problems with basic medicine. We found many people living with HIV and AIDS which was my original intent. As the new Wahudumu wa Afya (Swahili for "Volunteer Community Health Workers") became known, the numbers of patients/clients began to mount.

The key to the project was the willingness of local Catholic women to serve and befriend their sick and dying neighbors. Their motivation was Matthew 25:40. Stigma is still a problem for People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA); it was more so in 1997. These women respecting, visiting, befriending, and helping people who were dying has done a lot to educate communities and reduce the social stigma that has oppressed so many people living and dying from HIV and AIDS.

In 1998 I trained a second group bringing the total number of Wahudumu to 30. This meant many more clients to visit. Fortunately another nurse joined the project. She was a member of the Sisters of St. Joseph. She facilitated more Sisters becoming involved in the project in both nursing and counseling capacities. The Archbishop liked the project and encouraged us to expand.

We have gradually gone to seven parishes in two deaneries. More than 7000 clients are now being followed by more than 350 Wahudumu wa Afya and a large payroll of 13 nurses, eight counselors, two trainers, two social workers and other support staff. Our new Archbishop, Boniface Lele, wants all the parishes in the Archdiocese to offer services to PLWHA.
 

 

Constructing All Weather Roads in Shinyanga
By Paul Fagan

EDITOR'S NOTE: In the reality of mission in Africa the word founder can take on many meanings. If we follow St. Paul's advice "to be all things to all people" founding or building roads certainly qualifies.

On my 40th anniversary of ordination in 2000 I was sent by Bishop Balina to establish the new parish of St. Peter's in Nkololo Center, part of Old Maswa Parish. The work of building a parish will never be 100% complete, but we are well on the way. Some areas are less than 1% Christian. The words of our Lord are certainly true: "the fields are ripe for the harvest but the laborers are few." Sometimes the big question is where and how does one begin to make Christ known in such a vast area. Fortunately we have found means of making ourselves known to large numbers of people. Medical work has been a big help as well as our student sponsor program. However nothing has done so much to make the church known as our construction of 54 miles of all weather roads in Nkololo Parish. And we're not done yet! As our roads reach out into remote areas so does our construction of centers and the outstations that surround them. The resulting influx of people to our catechumenate and the number of people who come into the newly built churches gives evidence of the work of the Holy Spirit.

Construction begins with hauling materials, giving great joy to school children who beg for a bumpy ride. Cement blocks are made. Foundations are dug with the help of local Christians. Food is cooked for workers in the mud block grass roofed outstation. Now a foundation is being laid for St. Catherine Center in remote Halawa that was quite isolated until we built a road there. Fortunately a NGO built a bridge over a dangerous creek.

A new building design was used for Halawa Center. Nine outstations will be built in a similar fashion. All buildings are bigger than originally planned due to the Holy Spirit at work among the people in the area. Heavy rains did not deter us from celebrating the first Palm Sunday at St. Catherine's. Our road work paid off! Hundreds of people were waiting for us as we approached the new center. No one minded that we have yet to put in a cement floor. The Blessed Sacrament will soon be reserved in the new church fulfilling my goal of no one being further than 10 miles from the Eucharist.
 

 

Building a Virtual Mission on the Web at www.MaryknollAfrica.org
By David A. Smith

As the World Wide Web spread around the world like a wild fire in the 1990s, so too Africa was eventually enveloped. In response to this significant advance in how the world communicates, John Sivalon and Joe Healey encouraged me to take up the challenge of creating a website to share the good news of the missionary work of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers in Africa. At the Africa Regional Assembly in 2000, I presented this project to the members and received their strong support and cooperation. Each person agreed to contribute his own reflections, share his biography, and tell about his ministry. Photographs were taken, scanned, and captioned. Maryknoll Magazine articles were also included. The website, www.MaryknollAfrica.org was born.

I learned about creating websites by studying materials freely available on the Internet. I then organized the Maryknoll Africa Region’s website into two main sections: Where We Work and What We Do. Fifty-three missioners contributed materials for these pages. There are also smaller sections about Maryknoll Africa’s history, facts about Africa, contact information, and links to other Maryknoll websites. The site includes photo albums of different missions, archives about missions in which we recently served, and the ability to search the website for particular terms or names.
The site now includes 409 web pages, 1145 photos, 789 external hyperlinks, and 98 other files such as documents about mission, recordings of radio interviews with missioners, and all of the Africa Region Newsletters published since 2002. If one searches Google for the generic phrase, Mission in Africa, then the third entry in the results links to MaryknollAfrica.org (out of a total of 33,900,000 search results). If one searches for Maryknoll Africa, then our site is listed first (out of 105,000). Even searching simply for Maryknoll displays the region’s website in the eighth position (out of 807,000).

To date, the “Home Page” of the region’s website has been visited over 34,000 times. Of course, many visitors come to the site via search engines, so they tend to use links that take them directly to the site’s other pages. Judging from the server logs at Maryknoll, NY, (where the region’s website is hosted), it is estimated that at least 300,000 people have learned about the good news of Maryknoll’s work in Africa via this website. The online Guestbook contains messages from over 170 of these visitors. Others who have surfed our website have sent sizable donations to support missioners and their projects, while a few have even been inspired to volunteer to work in the missions.

The experience of building and maintaining the Africa Region’s website allowed me to create a site for Mike Kirwen’s Maryknoll Institute of Africa Studies (www.MIAS.edu) in Nairobi. Many of the institute’s students now discover the program and apply via the Internet. After founding the Computing Center for the new Bugando University College of Health Sciences in Mwanza, I also created its first website (www.Bugando.org).
Indeed the Internet is virtual mission territory. Maryknoll Africa has responded to the call and gone out to the field to share the Good News!
 

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Communications News Notes

New Videos
1. Ukweli Video Productions: Silver Jubilee 1981-2006. 25 minutes. DVD and VHS. PAL and NTSC. Produced by Ukweli Video, Nairobi, 2006.
2. How the Faith Came to Kenya. Brief story of the Spiritans, Consolata and Mill Hill’s journey of faith to Kenya. 35 minutes. DVD and VHS. PAL and NTSC. Produced by Ukweli Video, Nairobi, 2006.

New Books and Articles
1. After many years of research Don Sybertz has published the definitive version of the famous Sukuma myth of the clever young man Masala Kulangwa and the monster Shing’weng’we. It was published by Mathews Bookstore in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania in December, 2006 in booklets of 32 pages each in three separate languages:
English: Tears of Joy: African Story about Heroes and Monsters
Swahili: Machozi ya Furaha: Hadithi ya Mashujaa na Majitu
Sukuma: Shisoji ja Buyegi: Jigano ja Lishing’weng’we
2. To celebrate the "Year of Small Christian Communities (SCCs) in Tanzania" (December, 2006 to December, 2007) a Swahili book has been reprinted about Bishop Christopher Mwoleka and the founding of SCCs in Tanzania: Joseph G. Healey. Kuishi Injili: Mang'amuzi ya Jumuiya Ndogo Ndogo Nchini Tanzania. Peramiho: Benedictine Publications Ndanda--Peramiho, 2006. 68 pages.
3. To continue celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Maryknoll Society in Africa the July-August, 2006 Maryknoll News published a two page article (with four photographs) called "Africa Region Celebrates 60th Anniversary 1946-2006" (pages 8-9).
4. Many people do not have a chance to read our monthly Spanish magazine Revista Maryknoll. The September, 2006 issue had a nice story (with three photographs) on Father Paul Kam's ministry in Dar es Salaam called "China's First Missioner" (pages 35 to 37). See his accompanying article immediately above.
5. To continue celebrating the 60th Anniversary of the Maryknoll Society in Africa the November, 2006 Maryknoll Magazine published a five page article (with eight photographs) called "The Upside Down Church" (pages 32-36). An edited web version is posted on our Maryknoll Website at: http://society.maryknoll.org (as of 11 November, 2006).
 

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New Mission in Africa – New Maryknoll Associate Program
By Paul Kam

I think I am the first Maryknoll Associate to work in Africa who is not from America. This is a new type of Maryknoll Associate program. This is a new mission in Africa. I can say "one program for two missions." The first mission: Maryknoll helped a young diocesan priest in Hong Kong to experience his first missionary work and helped the diocese of Hong Kong to explore and develop the meaning of mission. The second mission: helping the church in Tanzania, the Archdiocese of Dar es Salaam. This program was made together by the Maryknoll Hong Kong Region and Africa Region.
 
I am very happy to participate in this new program, this new mission. I really had a wonderful experience in Tanzania. Thank you all the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers, especially those who work in Dar es Salaam. Although I am the only Chinese and I am not a Maryknoll priest, I really feel at home as a Maryknoller.
 
During my missionary work not only did I learn a lot of things but also I had the chance to do some new programs in Mtoni Parish. Especially the Tanzanian youth in Mtoni had the chance to get some exposure and expand their minds and hearts. 

2004: fourteen youth welcomed 23 youth from Hong Kong for three weeks.
2005: six youth went to Germany to participate in the World Youth Day.
2006: four youth went to Hong Kong to participate in the Asian Youth Day.

I am sure these programs not only helped the youth who participated but also stimulated the people who met them. I remember when the four Tanzanian youth who went to Hong Kong. On one hand they really learned a lot. On the other hand they gave the youth in Hong Kong a chance to meet new faces, to learn new things. Now the people in the Catholic Church in Hong Kong can see the fruits of the missionary work from their Hong Kong missioner (me). These are wonderful "encounter mission programs."
 
I hope that this kind of program not only will continue between Maryknoll and Hong Kong Diocese but also in other dioceses of different countries. May God bless all missioners so they can create more and more mission in the world. Multiple mission, explore mission, develop mission and expand the kingdom of God.
 

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