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What is our sister parish commitment?
After our first Mission Awareness Retreat five summers ago, the young people who participated returned from the trip with an idea: why don’t we at OLL “adopt” Esquipulas, one of the small communities we had visited? These young visionaries put together a proposal and presented it to our pastoral team and pastoral council, who enthusiastically supported it. We made a three-year commitment to a relationship with Esquipulas, a relationship that involves both fund-raising and consciousness-raising. The young people from that original group have continued to be part of our Sister Parish Team, along with other OLL parishioners who want to help make a difference! Now, three years later, we are happy to have raised almost $10,000 for Esquipulas, allowing them to construct a hanging bridge over the river which they must cross each day to get to work, school, and farm areas.
As we come to the end of our commitment to Esquipulas, our young missionaries have again identified a community in need of our help. Tacuba is a community in the west of El Salvador, an area that has been particularly devastated by earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The church in Tecuba, St. Mary Magdalene, is the heart of the community, and people literally walk hours down from the mountains each Sunday to have mass with their pastor, Fr. Servio Tulio. The school there educates almost 300 children (almost exactly the same size as OLL!) and there are many needs in the community. At least ten families in the community are in need of simple homes of sheet metal and mud brick. We would like to make Tacuba our Sister Parish for the next three years.
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