Dear Brothers in Christ, It is with great joy that I am contacting you, conveying my gratitude and that of my Congolese brothers and sisters for the shipment of two containers of humanitarian aid from the Orthodox Foreign Missionary Brotherhood. Their arrival created a festive atmosphere with dances, hymns and songs. With great enthusiasm the students of our Orthodox Theological School unloaded and filled the empty warehouses of the Metropolis. The two containers contained basic food items, clothing, stationery, sewing machines for the sewing school, folding beds, church utensils, bells, liturgical books (Paraclete, Pentecostal, Triodia, Menaia), various icons, theological books for the University library, dental equipment, insulation materials and many other items, all sent with much love by our brothers in Greece.
There are moments every day when I hear students talking to each other: “How much the Orthodox Greeks love us! We hear that they have a great economic crisis in Greece. They must be going through difficult situations! We did not expect them to have such a rich heart, that they would be deprived to help us. Blessed by God be they.” The gratitude of the students and the faithful and all of us who stop here in the vineyard of our Lord Jesus Christ to your Fraternity is great. Already after their arrival our associate Mrs. Styliani Papadopoulou organized with the students the distribution of clothes and shoes to poor students of our schools in the area of the capital city of Kinshasa, while food was distributed to families in great need in the surrounding villages.
I praise the Holy Triune God, who has merited me to serve Him in the depths of the African jungle and to transmit the true Orthodox faith to our indigenous brothers and sisters. A continuous thank you to His Beatitude Patriarch Theodore of Alexandria, who gave me the blessing to serve the long-suffering people of the Congo here. We thank you with all our hearts and I wish that the Most Merciful God will richly grant you His heavenly and earthly goods.
† Kinshasa Nikiforos
