Florida Catholic | Pennies From Heaven … To Tanzania

Pennies from heaven … to Tanzania

Religious education students at Our Lady of the Lakes raise funds to a build kitchen for a school in east Africa.

NICOLE ROMAN | FLORIDA CATHOLIC CORRESPONDENT

Published: 04.25.08

Adding It Up

Our Lady of the Lakes parishioners collected $10,000 for the Daughters of Mary mission in Tanzania the Sunday after Sister Sophia Mbihije spoke.

Their donations, combined with those of other parishes, add up to $443,697 collected throughout the archdiocese for missionaries around the world in 2007 alone.

For more information on Our Lady of the Lakes’ “pennies from heaven” project, contact Anita Brown, director of religious education, at 305-558-2202, ext. 625.

MIAMI LAKES | When the people of Our Lady of the Lakes Parish welcomed a missionary from Tanzania to their church last August, little did they imagine they would be going back to Africa with her — at least in the spiritual sense.

Sister Sophia Mbihije, a member of the Daughters of Mary, visited the parish as part of the archdiocese’s missionary cooperative plan, the aim of which is to bring missionaries and their experiences home to south Florida’s Catholics.

Normally, the parish takes up a collection for the missionary’s projects and that’s that. But Sister Mbihije’s stories about the Lumala School and Orphanage in Mwanza, Tanzania, moved Our Lady of the Lakes parishioners to do more.

The orphanage cares for more than 300 children whose parents have died due to AIDS and wars in the surrounding countryside. The sisters who run the orphanage can only offer the children one meal a day, and even that is a daunting task, as they must cook outside on an open fire. No meals can be served during the rainy season.

“As Sister Sophia spoke, it became clear to me that we needed to connect our children: hers in Tanzania and mine in Miami Lakes,” said Anita Brown, the parish’s director of religious education.

Perhaps the story hit home for Brown because it reminded her of similar stories told by her great aunt, a missionary from Montreal who served in Africa.

“I recall the Biafra famine especially,” Brown said. “She came to visit us when I was about 9 years of age and it left a mark on me that was awakened on that day (when Sister Mbihije spoke).”

“We saw the need and we saw that it was something that we could actually accomplish,” said Father James Murphy, pastor at Our Lady of the Lakes. “We weren’t just helping the missions in general. We were helping specific children who needed a hot meal every day. The concept that the children would have to wait until the rain stopped before they could eat their dinner, their one meal a day, that concept touched people’s hearts.”

Interestingly enough, the children from the religious education program were the first to embark on the journey, making it their yearlong service project and paving the way for parishioners and Our Lady of the Lakes School students, who made it their Lenten project.

Brown and her students came up with “pennies from heaven,” a drive to collect enough money to build a new kitchen for the Mwamza school. They used a 5-gallon water bottle to deposit pennies and other loose change. They also sold baked goods, ice cream and pizza to raise money.

At the end of three weeks, they had raised $1,753. By October, they were up to $6,000. But the kitchen they wanted to build would cost $29,000. So they continued to raise funds by selling T-shirts at Christmas.

When a parishioner mentioned the project to a friend who was in the restaurant business, the friend offered to throw a “paella party” to help the children’s cause. The parish collected $10,000 in sponsorships and ticket sales alone.

On the night of the party last January, Father Murphy played a short video that gave guests an inside look at Tanzania and the children the parishioners were helping. He invited anyone who felt touched by the film to come see him.

By the end of the night, the $10,000 had more than doubled, and the parish had raised more than $35,000 — not only enough to build a new kitchen, but also enough to build a power plant (known as bioga in Tanzania) that would supply electricity to the school.

The total amount of money raised so far is $51,000 and counting: $8,500 raised by the children in religious education; $1,700 raised by the school children; and $40,800 raised by parishioners.

The villagers in Tanzania also contributed just under $4,000 themselves to the kitchen project.

“To me, that was really a key thing, that they are part of it, of changing their future,” Brown said.

“The exciting part of this is that the students and catechists are taking this opportunity to live out the Gospel message and to reach out to help the poor,” added Brown, who also developed a pen-pal program so that the children from Tanzania and Miami Lakes could be in contact with each other.

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Pennies from heaven … to Tanzania

Adding It Up

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