Did you know that the Sisters Hospitallers are in Angola working to provide food, vitamins, and soap to 50 families who do not have these basic items? Find out all about this humanitarian project based in Lubango.
My name is Margarida Tavares Morais and I have been a Sister Hospitaller since 1998. I am a Mental Health Nurse and Theology student. I am currently in charge of the Mental Healthcare project that our institution runs in Angola.
Last year, there was a severe drought in Lubango, southern Angola. Since 2006, the Sisters Hospitallers have been developing a project in this city that aims to fight poverty and hunger. This project, which began in July 2021 and will run until July 2022, does not seem like a particularly special project because we all know how to “alleviate hunger”… but to give aid, in the most exhaustive sense, we must go one step further and do everything we can to reduce human suffering.
Since arriving in Angola, the Sisters Hospitallers have tried to respond to everyone’s needs and fight the stigma around mental illness and epilepsy, which are considered to be demonic possessions or curses. We have been able to improve the quality of life of many people living with this disease and their families. The quality of life of these patients and their families has been improved by providing psychiatric consultations, home visits, medication, and training to local staff.
Basic items.
However, in recent months, faced with our patients’ hunger and the various diseases associated with malnutrition, in a year of shortages of basic foods, this need has become palpable: hunger. And so we decided to launch this annual project, asking for food, vitamins, and soap for 50 families, which are delivered monthly through a kit made up of three basic items. It may not seem to be much, and it is not, but thinking of a patient who had to walk 15km to get to our office, having not eaten, this kind of aid, alongside medication, makes us believe that… we need to try our best and do what we can!
Thanks to the support of APARF (Portuguese Association of Friends of Raoul Follereau) and its generous financial contribution, we have been able to start this initiative. At the time, the Pope’s message regarding World Day of the Poor took on a different meaning for us: “Those who are generous should not ask for an account of their conduct, but only alleviate their poverty and satisfy their needs. The poor have only one plea: their poverty and the condition of need in which they find themselves. Do not ask anything else of them”.
Progress in this project has not been easy, because every day it becomes more difficult to understand who are the most in need… every day we have groups of people waiting at our door and sometimes we have to tell them “we have nothing to give”. On days like these, we feel utterly helpless and wonder if we will never solve this problem, which is not our problem alone. And, unfortunately, rain doesn’t seem to come, and we are forecasting a third year of drought.
Pandemic restrictions have prevented us from recruiting local volunteers, so the four sisters making up our Community have to manage this project and run the hospitaller centre by themselves. Over the years, we have seen communion, participation, and mission, and projects like this embody Pope Francis’ wish for an active Church that cares for those in extreme poverty.
Once again, we thank APARF for its solidarity and congregational communion, which helps us remain faithful to what our Founder wished for his daughters and those who suffer: One person is worth more than the entire world!
