This Kenyan nun runs a program for girls with disabilities

May 3, 2020 CNA Daily News News Briefs 0 Print

Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2020 / 06:01 am (CNA).- At a one-room house outside Nairobi, a 23-year-old girl with disabilities claps her hands and throws herself at Sr. Rose Catherine Wakibiru, who has been visiting girls with disability at their homes since the Kenyan government closed schools last month over coronavirus.

The girl, referred to as Faith, “is deaf and dumb,” Sr. Rose Catherine of the Assumption Sisters of Nairobi, told ACI Africa April 27. “She is autistic and has cerebral palsy and so she doesn’t know anything about social distancing. She has pure love in her heart and she can’t stop embracing people to show how happy she is.”

Faith lived at Limuru Cheshire Home along with 60 other girls who have physical or intellectual disabilities, before the pandemic.

Sr. Rose Catherine, administrator of the home, called the girls’ parents and guardians to retrieve their children when schools were closed.

“Most parents we called were not ready to pick their girls,” Sr. Rose Catherine said, adding that many girls at Cheshire home are drawn from poor backgrounds and that most come from informal settlements around Nairobi.

The nun explained that Faith initially lived with her mother and three siblings in a Nairobi slum, but they moved to another settlement “three weeks ago when their house was washed away in floods.”

When their house was washed away, Faith’s mother gave out her children to different well-wishers and looked for a place to stay herself. Later, friends helped her to get a single-roomed house where she stays with her three children and goes out to look for menial jobs to sustain her family.

Such jobs are hard to come by amid the restrictions due to coronavirus, and the family may be thrown out of their home as the mother is unable to pay for it.

Sr. Rose Catherine said five residents of the Cheshire home were taken in by other families, as they had nowhere to go.

“I know all [the] families that have their daughters here and I have an idea of those that can accommodate a girl [who] isn’t their own. So when I made those calls, I would ask a parent if they were willing to take care of an extra girl. That’s how I got all the five girls a place to stay,” said Sr. Rose Catherine.

To ease the burden of the foster parents, Limuru Cheshire Home supplies the girls with basic necessities such as food, soap, and sanitary materials in their new homes.

Some families were reluctant to have their daughters back home, and Sr. Rose Catherine said the biggest challenge for girls with disabilities and their families during coronavirus is poverty.

Most of the families “live on daily wages, and with their girls around they can’t go out and work as they used to. All the girls at the facility are special needs cases and they need someone to look after them” at all times, the nun said.

The girls also come last in families that grapple with lack of basic needs, such as food. When there is little food to share, children with disabilities do not get any of it, Sr. Rose Catherine reported.

“I have been to a home where I found my girl watching her siblings eat. When I asked her brother why her sister wasn’t eating anything, he said there was very little food in the house,” Sr. Rose Catherine recounted. “Children with disabilities are treated as second-rate individuals. People only think about them when everybody else has had their fill.”

Many of the girls’ families have asked the Assumption Sisters of Nairobi for help since having the girls returned to their care, and Sr. Rose Catherine has made at least eight home visits in recent weeks.

On each home visit, families are supplied with food, masks, and sanitizer.

“What we have at the moment is only enough to keep the families going for one more week, yet we have outreach plans for next week. We can only plan and hope that well-wishers will come on board to touch the lives of these vulnerable girls and their families,” Sr. Rose Catherine said.

 

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Catholics travel from Saudi Arabia to attend Pope Francis’ stadium Mass in Bahrain

November 5, 2022 Catholic News Agency 2
Pope Francis greets the crowd in Bahrain’s national soccer stadium before offering Mass on Nov. 5, 2022. / Vatican Media

Rome Newsroom, Nov 5, 2022 / 05:00 am (CNA).

About 30,000 people crowded into a soccer stadium on Saturday morning to attend the first public papal Mass in the Kingdom of Bahrain, a Muslim-majority island country in the Persian Gulf.

In the crowd was Julius Rhe, who traveled with his wife and son from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where restrictions prohibit the celebration of Catholic Masses in public.

“We are very honored to be part of this very, very memorable event. . . . We are very blessed,” Rhe told EWTN on Nov. 5.

The Rhe family traveled from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to attend Mass with the pope in Bahrain. Alexey Gotovsky/EWTN
The Rhe family traveled from Riyadh, Saudi Arabia to attend Mass with the pope in Bahrain. Alexey Gotovsky/EWTN

The Rhe family practices the Catholic faith at home and has attended a private Mass in an apartment while living in Saudi Arabia.

According to Bahrain’s Daily Tribune, around 2,900 of the registered attendees at the stadium Mass with Pope Francis came from neighboring Saudi Arabia.

Reuters reported that foreign workers living in Saudi Arabia were bussed in for the Mass over the King Fahd Causeway that connects the two countries.

Many of the Gulf region’s foreign workers come from the Philippines, India, Pakistan, and other South Asian countries.

Pope Francis receives the gifts during Mass in Bahrain on Nov. 5, 2022. Vatican Media
Pope Francis receives the gifts during Mass in Bahrain on Nov. 5, 2022. Vatican Media

Catholic foreign workers living in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates also traveled for the Mass.

Pope Francis arrived to cheers at Bahrain’s national soccer stadium as he greeted the enthusiastic crowd from the popemobile.

In his homily, the pope repeated the words of St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans: “Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

Pope Francis said that Jesus “suffers when he sees in our own day and in many parts of the world, ways of exercising power that feed on oppression and violence, seeking to expand their own space by restricting that of others, imposing their own domination and restricting basic freedoms, and in this way oppressing the weak.”

In the face of the oppression and enmity that exist today, the Gospel calls Christians to “love everyone, even our enemies,” the pope said.

A family waits for Pope Francis' arrival in Bahrain's National Stadium on Nov. 5, 2022. Alexey Gotovsky/EWTN
A family waits for Pope Francis’ arrival in Bahrain’s National Stadium on Nov. 5, 2022. Alexey Gotovsky/EWTN

Christians make a small minority in Bahrain. While it is more than 70% of Bahrain’s total population of 1.5 million is Muslim, there are about 161,000 Catholics living in the country, according to 2020 Vatican statistics. The country is home to two Catholic churches and 20 Catholic priests.

Pope Francis described Bahrain as “a living image of coexistence in diversity” and “an image of our world, increasingly marked by the constant migration of peoples and by a pluralism of ideas, customs and traditions.”

He added: “It is important, then, to embrace Jesus’ challenge: ‘If you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?’”

At the end of the Mass, Bishop Paul Hinder, the apostolic administrator of the Apostolic Vicariate of Northern Arabia thanked Pope Francis for showing “pastoral care for a tiny Church in a tiny country.”

The bishop said: “Like your patron Saint Francis of Assisi, you are not afraid to build bridges with the Muslim world and to show your fraternal closeness to all people of goodwill regardless of their cultural background and religious belief.”

“We Christians in the Middle East—those of ancient Oriental tradition and those who as migrants temporarily live in this part of the world—try to implement the invitation of Saint Francis to his brothers to ‘live spiritually among the Muslims … not to engage in arguments and [simply] to acknowledge that [we] are Christians.’”

Pope Francis expressed his gratitude to the Catholics who had traveled from Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region to attend the Mass. He said: “I bring today the affection and closeness of the universal Church, which looks to you and embraces you, which loves you and encourages you.”

“May the Blessed Virgin, Our Lady of Arabia, accompany you on your journey and preserve you constantly in love towards all.”

Alexey Gotovsky contributed to this report.

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