A school in Pakistan
In the Sindh province of Pakistan live the Kachi Kohli people, families who for generations have known little but bonded labour, and whose children have rarely had the chance to learn to read. Fr Rebenie Madar has been working to establish a simple tuition school for them, at Shakirim, so that the next generation might have something their parents were denied. It is not a grand building. It is a teacher, a room, and a way out that begins with a child learning her letters. A gift here goes towards keeping that school standing and growing.
Keeping children learning in Cameroon
In the North-West of Cameroon, years of conflict have closed the schools, and a whole generation of children has lost the years they should have spent learning. Through the Thirst for Learning work, Fr Cyprian Ta-ah has been keeping some form of schooling alive in the area around Oku, in whatever room can be found, with whatever teacher will come. He has written of children turning up even on holidays, desperate to be taught. A gift here helps those classrooms carry on in a place where they should not have to be improvised, but are.
Standing with women in Cameroon
The same conflict has fallen hardest on women. Fr Cyprian has written of mothers who lost their homes to gunfire and their health to the shock of it, left with children to raise and nothing to raise them on. The Society’s work in Anglophone Cameroon includes standing with these women: helping them recover, and find their feet, and know they have not been forgotten. A gift here supports that quiet, patient accompaniment, which rarely makes the news and matters enormously to the women it reaches.
Training the next missionaries
None of the rest happens without people to do it. Around two hundred young men are in formation now to become Mill Hill missionaries, most of them from the very countries the Society once travelled to, preparing over many years to serve their own peoples and others beside them. In 2020 nine were ordained and sent out to Pakistan, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Cameroon, Malaysia and the Philippines. A gift here forms the priests and brothers who will still be carrying this work long after the rest of us have set it down.
Where the need is greatest
Not everything can be planned for. A crisis arrives, a community loses something it relied on, a need appears that no appeal anticipated. The Where the Need is Greatest fund exists for exactly that: gifts the Society can direct to wherever, across its work in Africa and Asia, the need is sharpest at the time. If you would rather trust the Society to send your gift where it is most needed, this is the way to do it.
What to do next?
If one of these has caught your heart, that is usually the right one to choose. There is no wrong answer, and no pressure to decide today. When you are ready, our page on the ways to support sets out how to give, whether as a one-off gift, a regular one, or through the Red Box. And whether you give to a project or simply pray for it, you would be taking real part in real work.
