Dear Benefactors! Thank you for all of last year's unbelievable wave of help to the missions, which exceeded our wildest dreams and expectations! We will soon share with you a Report that will fully show what the Dehonian Missionary Family has been able to accomplish in 2024, but we are already outlining our plans for the next 12 months.
The year 2025 will be a time of continuing long-term projects, implementing projects started in the past year, but we will also take on new challenges, and these are always a bit of an unknown.
Above all, we will continue to support the children and adolescents being cared for in as many as five projects of Heart's Adoption at a Distance. Thanks to Adoption of Light India and Adoption of Light Rwanda, there are more than 250 blind children under the wings of adoptive parents from Poland from school and educational institutions in India and Rwanda, run by the Franciscan Sisters Servants of the Cross. Thanks to this project, the children are provided with education, boarding accommodation and everything they need for healthy and all-round development.
Two adoptions in Bolivia - Adoption of Love and Adoption of Hope - have already become permanent fixtures in the hearts of our Padrinos (Spanish for godparents), who provide orphans from Cochabamba and toddlers whose parents are convicts serving sentences in Santa Cruz prison with a dignified life and support their upbringing and education. The Sisters of the Sacred Heart who run the orphanage in the Andes do not receive any help from the state - it is our Donors who guarantee the existence of this home and the resulting gratitude cannot be expressed in words. The same is true of the orphanage run by the Seraphite Sisters in the Bolivian tropics - the help of Polish Donors has lifted from the Sisters' shoulders the concern about finances, so crucial for the operation of an institution of this type.
The last adoption on this list is actually the one that started it all. The form of regular, monthly financial support was first tentatively proposed in connection with the needs of the Kasanag Heart House for Girls (KDF) in the Philippines. Thus was born Adoption of Hearts, which cares for victims of sexual violence in that island country.
We won't stop digging more deep water wells in Chad and Tanzania in 2025 either! And it's hard to believe that more than 300 of them have already been constructed in Chad alone since the project's inception!
In the summer of 2025, Izabela Cywa's team will travel to the Central African Republic for the sixth time as part of the Safe Mom training project. Each additional trained midwife is a real chance for safe childbirth in a country that has one of the highest maternal and child death rates in the world.
This year we will invariably take care of our missionaries, whom we help with their recovery and treatment during their vacations in the homeland, but we also do not forget about their needs in the missions - thanks to the project Means of transportation for missionaries, we will try to help them reach with the Good News even further! We will also make sure that there is no shortage of "laborers in the Lord's Cause". - as in previous years, we ask you to support the Heart seminarians in the Philippines.
This year will see the start of the eagerly awaited construction of an elementary school with a boarding house in the parish of Gam in Chad. This is another school that our Donors will build together with missionary Fr. Edward Ryfa and volunteer Daniel Cieszynski.
Speaking of volunteers - we are constantly waiting for candidates for our Missio Cordis missionary volunteer service. We already invite you to this year's first formation meeting on March 14-16, 2025 at the Mission House in Olsztyn. Our volunteers have the opportunity to go to the countries of Heart missionary service, such as Albania, the Philippines and Bolivia. We are also already thinking about the next pilgrimage of the Heartland Missionary Family, and for the end of the year we are planning a Donor trip to Santa Cruz, Bolivia.
What else will 2025 bring? We don't know, but we are open to what lies ahead. We feel that this work is bigger than all of us, and that the Holy Spirit is leading us, so we rely on His inspiration. Thank you for being with us!
Priests and Lay Staff
of the Secretariat for Foreign Missions
of the Priests of the Sacred Heart