Dear Brothers, By the grace of God, for three years now I have been ministering in the Holy Metropolis of Irinople in Tanzania, at the invitation of His Eminence Metropolitan Demetrios. Tanzania is perhaps the most peaceful country in East Africa, and so its name agrees with the truth of the matter. It is seven times larger in area than Greece, and has a population of about 35 million. With the unfailing efforts of His Eminence our Metropolitan and with the financial support of the Mother Brotherhood, as well as of many anonymous and anonymous donors from Greece and Cyprus, both the building and the spiritual missionary activities of the Holy Metropolis of Irinople are, by the grace and mercy of God, being blessed.
α) Iriga Missionary Centre
Thus, since five years ago, a large Missionary Centre has been operating in the region of Iriga (south-central part of the country), and in the surrounding area twelve holy temples, two primary schools, two clinics have been built, while 40 wells and two large boreholes have been drilled to meet the water supply needs of the poor natives. Ten local priests have been ordained and thousands of believers have been baptised. A kindergarten and a boarding school for boys are run in the above Missionary Centre , and a daily drink (milk and biscuits) and meal is given to more than two hundred orphaned children, irrespective of creed or religion. The above-mentioned area is plagued by AIDS, with the tragic result that there are so many orphans. Clergymen of our diocese organize seminars to educate the local population on this serious problem, while all our orphaned children are subject to regular medical check-ups.
b) Arusha Missionary Centre
Arusha is a large urban centre, much like Thessaloniki, and apart from the holy church of the Greek community and the adjacent brilliant school complex, which also belongs to the community, there is nothing but an Orthodox presence, while all other denominations are organised, with the Pentecostals as protagonists, who are constantly gaining ground, due to the theatrical manner of the alleged cures carried out by some of their supposedly “charismatic” pastors. So a plot of land of about 25 acres was found where , by the grace of God, we will build a new missionary center with a church of Archangel Michael, a clinic and an elementary school. In Mosi, another large town in the region where thousands of Greeks used to live (and where perhaps the first modern Greek missionary, Fr. Nicodemus Sarikas, who passed away in 1941, and about whom someone should one day devote a monograph to him), there was since 1950 the peristyle church of St. Dionysius the Areopagite, which the last Greeks sold to the American Baptist Protestants before leaving. With the many efforts of His Eminence and with the financial help of your Brotherhood, through the donation of 20,000 €, we hope that we will soon recover the above church, which the Americans wanted to sell to the Yehovah’s Witnesses. In another large town in the region, Tanga, where mainly Muslims live, we intend to build another Temple, in addition to the existing one, which also belongs to the once flourishing Greek community, because we have many devotees. Here is also the grave of the late
π. Nicodemus Sarika.
It is a great joy and blessing, my brothers and sisters, to work in the Mission, and despite the great difficulties and problems, the sense of the presence of God, the Virgin Mary and the Saints is very evident! God opens roads, where roads are opened by walking, because they simply do not exist, and we follow, admiring the Lord’s great strides, for the evangelization of our brothers and sisters in Africa.
Monk Agathonikos.
Archbishop of the Metropolis of Irinople in Tanzania.
