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September-October 2003

Our Hideaway

Presence, A Source of Healing

By Elbert Balbastro

The author is a Columban seminarian on a two-year First Mission Assignment (FMA) in Pakistan. Here he shares about his pastoral experience while in the Philippines. Both FMA and Pastoral Ministry form parts of the formation program for seminarians preparing to become a Columban missionary priest.


Elbert Balbastro (front) and Jerry Lohera (back) in Pakistan, March 2018

“I want to be healed. Please help me.” This is a very common petition by the patients at San Lazaro Hospital, Manila. My pastoral experience there for eight months visiting Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS patients opened my eyes to see how these diseases had affected them. Through this ministry, I saw the “poorest of the poor” in them because aside from poor health, most of them were also deprived from material and financial resources.

Stolen Childhood

By Father Shay Cullen SSC

Fr Shay Cullen of Ireland is a Columban Father working in the Philippines since 1969. He helps children imprisoned and abused by a corrupt judicial system. PREDA (www.preda.org) was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2001.

Little has changed in the Philippine prison system since that day several years ago when I found a 6-year-old named Rosie behind prison bars clutching a drink can and crying her heart out for her mother. A dozen or so other street children were sprawled on the hard concrete floor, unconscious with exhaustion and hunger.

Meeting Mother Teresa

By Fr Michael Mohally SSC

The first time I was to have met Mother Teresa was in Hong Kong. I was asked to bring a package to her there from where she was to accompany Sisters into China to set up the first foundation of the Missionaries of Charity there. When I got to the convent I was told that the China foundation was on ‘hold’. Newspapers had got hold of the story and said that she was going there as the representative of the Pope. Rather than wait around Mother Teresa had gone to Hanoi to set up a new foundation there.

The First Time I Danced the Meke!

By Rowena ‘Weng’ Dato Cuanico

The following articles are by two Columban lay missionaries who have lived in each other’s country. Rowena is a Filipino lay missionary in Fiji. Paulo was a Fijian lay missionary in the Philippines. Read on.

I love to dance. So, when I arrived in Fiji in October 2000 as a Columban lay missionary, I became fascinated with the meke, a traditional Fijian dance that tells the stories of ancient legends.

Martyrs Of Love

By Father Seán Coyle SSC

This article is based mainly on a report sent to the members of the Missionaries of Charity by Sister M Raphael MC, regional superior in Amman, Jordan, in 1998.

Sister Mary Michael MC was born Victoria Espejon in the Philippines on 21 September 1961. Along with Sr M Zelia MC (Pancratia Minj) and Sr M Aletta MC (Albisia Dung Dung), both from India and just a little younger, she was shot dead in the Red Sea port city of Hodeidah, in the south of Yemen, on the morning of 27 July 1998.

Life In The Cordillera Of Chile

By Sr Sally Oyzon SSC

Sibaya, 2, 658 meters above sea level, is a four-hour drive over lowland and mountain deserts from the city of Iquique in northern Chile. It is in one of four inland pueblos in which I ministered in the 1990s. A once thriving community, Sibaya is now sparsely populated. The 35 or so families are those with children up to Grade Six and older ones whose adult children have moved away. As in otherpueblos in the Chilean Cordilleras, the people are of Aymara descent.

‘You Need New Shoes. . . Will I buy you a Black Pair?’

By Father Seán Connaughton SSC

A student for the priesthood in Ireland used to be recognizeable by his black suit, hat, tie – with white shirt – and shoes. While walking in a field with my father in the summer of 1955, he said to me, ‘You need new shoes. . . will I buy you a black pair?’ I knew that whatever opposition I thought he and my mother had to my desire to be a Columban priest was over. Maybe they’d never opposed the idea but there was no one on either side of the family who had ever become a priest and I didn’t see myself as particularly religious.

For a long time I had dreamed of being either a teacher or an accountant. A secondary dream was to be a horticulturalist, perhaps because of all the planting we did when I was a child during ‘The Emergency,’ the name given in Ireland to World War II in which we were neutral.

‘Maestra di Campagna’

By Sister Sonia Sangel FdCC

‘If everyone lit just one little candle, what a bright world this would be!’

This is what my heart was singing as I began my mission in East Timor a few months after the war in 1999, my second mission ad gentes – ‘to the nations’ – after six adventurous years in Papua New Guinea. I wished to be one of many who might light just one little candle, particularly in the world of women. Women constitute 49.5 % of the population of East Timor. By their sheer number alone they can be looked upon as key economic and social agents in this newly born, struggling nation.

And Far Away…Some Children Smile

By Fr Anthony T Pizarro CICM

No, this is not a publicity campaign using the ever-admired slogan on the bumper stickers of the one million or so tricycles that the city of Tuguegarao is known for. This is the story of how my belovedalma mater, St Louis University of Tuguegarao, has come to the aid of some people here in Senegal, of how SLU has extended its social awareness across the world to the people of this west African country.

A Life With Criminals

By Paulo Baleinakorodawa

Paulo Baleinakorodawa worked for three years in the Philippines as a Columban lay missionary. He is now coordinator of Columban Companions in Mission in his native Fiji.

People used to ask me in the Philippines why I hung around so much with criminals. It wasn’t easy to answer. Perhaps it was because of my love and compassion for them. But deep within me was a burning passion to help them know and feel that, despite their wrongdoing, God loved them in the same way He loved those in free society. Here the strength of the message of the Cross became real – God loves and accepts each one of us with no strings attached.

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