SUCCESSES  :  The Call to Preach    The Call to Teach  The Call to Heal   The Call to Build

Our role as missionaries must include teaching. Since our beginnings in Africa in 1868, mission schools have been founded to enable individuals and communities to reach their highest potential with pride and dignity.

Successes:

Tens of thousands of African leaders in all walks of life are graduates of schools established by the Missionaries of Africa. In most of the countries where they have worked they established and managed the formal educational system of universities and colleges, secondary and vocational schools for boys and girls, as well as innumerable grade schools and kintergardens.

But even outside the formal educational system they have created a massive non-formal educational process for men and women, girls and boys. They have encouraged literacy, established radio stations and media centers, newspapers and magazines, taught agriculture and animal husbandry, established nutritional programs, have spearheaded AIDS education programs.

• School in Mathare Slums

  It's hard for children to think about the future when most of the people they know are dying from diseases such as AIDS and malaria. But that's the challenge of missionary work - bringing light to those surrounded by darkness . . . giving hope to those suffering in the depths of despair.

  Kenya is a place of incredible natural beauty - but in the midst of this, millions of people are dying from disease. School aged children saw their lives and their future crumbling before them. They wondered aloud if there was any reason to think about life beyond today. But when the Missionaries of Africa funded the Mathare School in rural Kenya in East Africa, hope was born for children who had struggled to see beyond the moment. As their school was rebuilt, they began to believe again - to believe that someone cares - that they are not alone. They have begun to see that the world is theirs . . . and that life is worth living!

• The Water Tanks

  When the Missionaries of Africa were founded in 1868, one of the key tenets was that its members are to help the African people build a better future. Sometimes "building a better future" can be a philosophy - other times it can be building with bricks and mortar, metal and wood.

  With a grant of $5,000 to the Rural Livestock Improvement Program, our missionaries working in Uganda were able to help some of East Africa's most impoverished people build the water tanks they desperately needed for care of their livestock and for crop irrigation. Sounds simple. But to the men, women and children of the Arua region, this simple act has given them food and water for years to come. "When I was hungry, you gave me to eat. When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink."