We Would Love
to Keep in Touch!

EVERYTHING HAS COME TRUE Morais Jeremy  Fr Jeremy Morais with his schoolchildrenJust a year ago, Fr. Jeremy Morais. MS wrote me these prophetic lines: This will be my last year in Ankavandra. I will celebrate 25 years of priesthood, and will get a vacation to celebrate that event with family on May 22. I will be available for mission appeals and take a mini-sabbatical. Upon returning to Madagascar I will most likely be given a new mission district. I guess it’s God’s will that I remain here just long enough to finish the convent for the sisters who will eventually arrive. And to be very honest, after 15 years working in the isolated district of Ankavandra, I’ll be ready for a change. Wherever the Bishop and the Provincial send me, I’m ready and willing to go.

 

Everything has come true. Now Fr. Jeremy is back in Madagascar, and has been assigned to the district of Ambatolahy – a mission post with a rapidly growing Catholic community. Unlike Ankavandra – perhaps the most isolated mission districts in the diocese of Morondava – his new mission post will now be just a few yards off the main road to the high plateau, and that will put him in an unusual situation – having to play host to a variety of visitors!

EVERYTHING HAS COME TRUE Soup Kitchen in AmkavandraIn 1974 the pastoral care of that district was joined to the neighboring district of Malaimbandy where I ministered, some 50 miles to the south. Between them there were no paved roads, no bridges. Each time  I crossed through the Sakeny river, there was the possibility – and it happened a few times – that I would get stuck on the northeast side of the river. Then I would have to wait a week or so before daring to drive through the river again. The bridge – one of the longest at that time in all of Madagascar – was built eight years later. To access the bridge a road was constructed with a mile-long levee leading up to it. As happens even here in the States – Kartina saw to that – levees don’t always hold. Once the flood waters from a hurricane caused a 100-foot breach in the levee. For the next few years we had to make a 22-mile detour around it. It is now the main road between the coast and the high plateau. Although heavily traveled, the thin layer of blacktop that was put on the road was never made to withstand the humongous trucks that barrel over it in all kinds of weather. Today it is in terrible shape, taking  sometimes eight hours to make the 100 mile trip from Malaimbandy to Maindrivazo. Often we were grateful for the stop in Ambatolahy. So Fr. Jeremy should have plenty of visitors – even though it will take a long time to make up for those 15 years of solititude in Ankavandra.