My dear brothers, rejoice in the Lord.
By God’s grace and our most reverend Bishop’s blessings, we write to you this brief letter to express once more the thankfulness of our Malawian brothers for your generous offers.
Let us make it known to your love that our Mission continues to offer daily:
Common meals
Common meals for 300 poor children attending our kindergartens. It is imperative to keep giving our help to indigent families, that’s why we ask for every loving small or big offer.
Visits to prisoners
We also strive to preserve our charitable visits to our imprisoned brothers. It’s a great relief they get and we really pray to God to enlighten our donors specifically for this program.
Holy Church construction
We remind you of our great desire to erect the church of the Nativity of the Saviour. It’s almost a year since H.B. the Patriarch laid the foundation stone for this yet-to-be-built church in the heart of Blantyre. The Urban Planning Service has already approved of the design and we pray that a devout donor will come up for this sacred purpose. Therefore, we inform to your love that the Holy Church is estimated to cost 85,ooo €, a considerably high amount of money for this critical economic period.
Collaborators’ training
In addition, let us remind to your love that within our missionary efforts and care, we consider it very important to see about the training of potential indigenous priests and catechists. These people are the living hope for the continuation of our missionary work. For this reason we send annually 3 to 4 indigenous seminarists to the two Orthodox Ecclesiastical Schools: that of the Patriarchate of Alexandria in Egypt and that of the Holy Metropolis of Kenya. The expenses for every seminarist come to 1,200 € annually, plus a small monthly allowance of 40 € as financial support to their families.
- We pray to God to enlighten noble donors to embrace and support the programs of our mission aforementioned so that we will be able to keep working for the annunciation of our African brothers, not only out of love for God, but also out of love for our much afflicted fellow man. God bless you all.
Fr. Ermolaos Iatrou
