Your help for Zimbabwe

Your generosity is helping to sow the seeds of faith in Zimbabwe. Here are some of the projects that you have enabled us to support.

£25,000 to train 97 seminarians

"If there was just one project that Aid to the Church in Need was able to support in our country, I would ask that it could be suport for seminarians," one bishop told us. Vocations are high in the country despite the increasing oppression of clergy and faithful. You are helping the priests of the future along the long road to ordination. The bishop paid tribute to the soldarity you have shown, saying: "Although we are thousands of miles apart, we share the same faith. We understand each other."

£12,500 for a 4x4 to help Father John and Sister Mary's work

Father John and Sister Mary work in one of the poorest and most remote parts of Zimbabwe, where there is little education, poor healthcare and regular droughts and crop failures. Together, they have built up two primiary schools and two mission centres, one complete with its own church. They  support some 200 orphans and offer pastoral care house-to-house. Sister Mary said: "May God bless you all. You are making it possible for us to do our work in the service of the Gospel."

£21,000 to produce 7,500 hymn books in the local Shona language

"In Zimbabwe, music plays a very important role in the liturgical celebrations," explained one bishop in his request for help to print a new hymn book in the local Shona language, which is the language of the majority of the country's Catholic population. The religious Sister who coordinated the project added: "A hymn book with all the songs makes it possible for everybody to participate in the singing, not just those in the choir." So thanks to you, the faithful are able to join in fully with the celebration of Mass.

£12,500 to support Youth Alive

The Youth Alive programme is helping to fill a major gap in young people's lives in Zimbabwe. The programme offers counselling, leadership training and career guidance, as well as important HIV/AIDS education, prevention and management programmes. Overseen by religious Sisters, Youth Alive also reaches out to the most vulnerable members of society, includign the disabled, the deaf, orphans and street children.

The scheme is "meeting the needs of our young people and I can truly say it is a very modern tool for evangelisation, bringing the Good News," one bishop wrote. "Youth Alive really has young people's interests at heart."

£84,000 in Mass stipends for 245 priests around the country

With the country in economic meltdown, unemployment above 80 percent and the threat of drought and crop failure, priests in Zimbabwe are reliant on your Mass stipends for their survival – the parishioners are uanble to support them, as they themselves have to go hungry.

One bishop wrote to Aid to the Church in Need to request Mass stipends, saying: "This year again six of the ten provinces of Zimbabwe wil suffer a complete crop failure. The rains set in early, but then stopped causing the crops to wither in the fields. The poor soils in our diocese combined with the lack of rains will once again lead to a severe famine. The Mass stipends will go a long way towards alleviating the difficulties of our priests."