Brenda, who is currently serving as Director of Catholic Education in the Port Pirie Diocese, has a long background in both education and mission, having already undertaken similar placements in other countries over many years. Continue reading

Established by the Good Samaritan Sisters in 2009, the Centre provides pre-school learning opportunities for children aged three to five years.

Senator Concetta Fierravanti-Wells, Minister for International Development and the Pacific, and Senator Claire Moore, Labour's Shadow Minister, were on a three-day visit to Kiribati.

"I was really pleased to visit the Early Childhood Centre and see the good work that the Good Samaritans were doing," said Fierravanti-Wells.

"There was a great sense of community with both children and parents there to welcome us,."

Fierravanti-Wells is a former student of a Good Samaritan School, St Mary's Star of the Sea College, Wollongong, in New South Wales.

Last year she met up with Sister Clare Condon, Congregational Leader of the Good Samaritan Sisters.

Condon encouraged the senator to visit the sisters in Kiribati and see the work of the Centre first-hand.

Moore said the visit to the Good Samaritan Early Childhood Centre was "very special".

"The long-standing dedication of the sisters was evident in the historical photographs at the Centre, and the clear commitment to the future of education for Kiribati children," she said.

Good Samaritan Sister Kakare Biita, Director of the Good Samaritan Early Childhood Centre, said she and Sister Tuata Terawete were "very happy to welcome our important guests from Australia".

In her welcoming address Biita spoke about the history of the Good Samaritan Sisters' presence and ministry in Abaokoro.

She outlined the planned development of the Centre, which includes the construction of an additional classroom and staff area.

"We are very honoured for their visit," said Kakare, "especially for the visit of Senator Honourable Concetta, a former student of a Good Samaritan School, and we admired her as a woman gifted for leadership."

Source

• Good Oil
• Image: Good Oil

Known as the "Kiribati Commitment", the programme aims to provide young teachers in the Port Pirie Diocese with an opportunity to live and work alongside the Good Samaritan Sisters in Kiribati and to be immersed in broader community life.

Brenda Keenan, Director of Catholic Education in the Port Pirie Diocese, who has been instrumental in making the "Kiribati Commitment" a reality, said the emphasis is on mutual learning and enrichment for all involved.

She described this year's inaugural outreach experience to the village of Abaokoro, where a community of three i-Kiribati sisters run the Good Samaritan Early Learning Childhood Centre, as "an outstanding success".

"From the outset I knew that it was going to be very good, but my expectations were met one-hundred-times-fold - and I had extremely high expectations," she said.

"The outreach experience, on so many different levels, was fantastic."

The 12 teachers all conveyed similar sentiments.

Keenan said the Kiribati outreach program will continue to evolve over the coming years.

"There will be future and ongoing opportunities for staff from across our diocesan schools to travel and witness this amazing Pacific country and its people, and there will be opportunities for the i-Kiribati Good Samaritan Sisters to visit our diocese and schools,"
she said.

"Our partnership is two-ways (both ways), as we continue to cultivate and grow our cross-cultural learnings, friendships and understandings."

Source

• goodsams.org.au
• Image: goodsams.org.au

The Mass of Thanksgiving was celebrated by Bishop Paul Mea MSC, the same bishop who originally invited the Good Samaritan Sisters to take up ministry in Kiribati to help with the educational and pastoral needs of the people of his diocese.

From small beginnings, with the arrival of just one sister, Veronica McCluskie, in 1991, there are today two communities of Good Samaritan Sisters, engaged in a variety of educational, pastoral and community development ministries in Kiribati.

These include running the Good Samaritan Early Childhood Learning Centre, teaching English at the local primary school, offering pastoral care to patients at the psychiatric hospital and those in prison, and supporting people with physical and intellectual disabilities.

Religious vocations from Kiribati have also been rich over the 25 years. There are currently six professed i-Kiribati sisters, three novices studying in Australia, and a number of inquirers who are exploring their interest in Good Samaritan life.

Among the contingent of Good Samaritan sisters who travelled to Kiribati was Sister Sonia Wagner, whose association with Kiribati goes back even before 1991.

Sonia was asked by the Congregational Leader, Sister Helen Lombard, to travel to Kiribati in 1989 to assess the feasibility of the Good Samaritans responding to Bishop Mea's repeated requests to establish a presence there.

"It was an amazing experience," she recalled, "landing on this coral atoll in the middle of the Pacific and meeting all these wonderful people."

Sonia said the 25th anniversary celebrations in Kiribati were a joyful, but emotional time.
"It was a time that gave me a real sense of the way that God has guided us and called us and also that there was a great sense of partnership in this," she said.

Source
goodsams.org.au
Image: goodsams.org.au

On December 8, 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbour. This brought Japan into World War II. At that time I was eight years old and living in Manchuria.

My family had moved to Manchuria from Tokyo in 1938 when I was six. There, we lived in Botanko, very close to the Russian border, and my father worked for the army.

As the war progressed, we began to hear about the bombing of Tokyo, Osaka and other industrial cities in Japan. We also heard how people were suffering from shortages of food and other necessities of life.

In Manchuria, however, we were a long way from the battles and did not suffer like that.

But on August 8, 1945, life changed dramatically for my family. At 5:00am I was woken by a terrible noise. People were shouting that Russia had declared war on Japan in Manchuria.

That same day, in the afternoon, Russian B-29s crossed the border and began dropping bombs. That evening, Russian tanks invaded Manchuria and a fierce battle was fought; the Japanese forces were defeated.

Earlier in the day the evacuation of civilians had begun. As we were waiting for cars to take us to the train station, the bombers came over Botanko. At that moment we became refugees: my mother, my younger brother and me.

My elder brother, who had just turned 18, had been called up for military duty along with all male students. It would be some years before we would meet him again. There was no time to say goodbye to friends or teachers; I have never met any of them since. Continue reading

• Good Samaritan Sister Theresia Hiranabe has a background in secondary school teaching, adult faith formation and pastoral work in Japan. Now retired, she lives in Nara and is involved in adult faith formation, catechetics and scripture studies.
• Sister Theresia's article, used with permission, was first published in The Good Oil, the e-magazine of the Good Samaritan Sisters.

The Rite of First Profession took place during Eucharist at St Thomas Aquinas Church in Springwood, NSW, Australia.

Both women were born and raised in the Republic of Kiribati.

In the coming weeks, Juniko and Tuata will return to Kiribati where they will continue with a study program and engage in ministry.

They are part of a growing group of Kiribati women drawn to the Good Samaritan way of life.

Currently this group consists of two perpetually professed sisters, four temporary professed sisters and three women in the pre-novitiate phase.

The Good Samaritan sisters have been working in Kiribati since since 1991.

They are involved in education, pastoral and community development roles.

The Congregation of the Sisters of Good Samaritan of the Order of St Benedict, known affectionately as the Good Sams, is Australia's first ‘home-grown' congregation of Catholic religious women.

Archbishop John Bede Polding, an English Benedictine monk and Australia's first bishop, founded them in Sydney in 1857.

Today, there are around 235 sisters living and working throughout Australia, in Japan, Kiribati, and the Philippines.

Source

• goodsams.org.au
• Image: goodsams.org.au

My initial reaction to that question was somewhat confronting.

Besides the "Francis factor", I saw very few signs of hope in the Church.

This response was probably strongly influenced by the heart-rending stories of pain, suffering and broken trust that have been told by survivors at the hearings of the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse.

So I began anew to seek out the signs of hope.

Two areas that both the Church and the world are willing to name and address, are the evil of human trafficking and the ecological crisis. The Good Samaritan Sisters share concerns and hope for both areas.

Recently the Vatican sponsored a conference in Rome, authorised by Pope Francis, which was a collaboration between the British government and police and the Catholic Church, to address the evil of human trafficking which extends across all country boundaries. There, the heroic work of religious women was named and acclaimed.

The conference called on all politicians worldwide to give this issue greater recognition.

Soon afterwards, the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, announced that the US State Department is planning to work with the US Conference of Catholic Bishops to map and co-ordinate the Church's efforts on a global basis, to help combat the crime of human trafficking. Continue reading.

Mary McDonald is a Good Samaritan Sister who has worked as a teacher, principal, facilitator and consultant in education for many years.

Source: The Good Oil

Image: Catholic Religious Australia

Last month however, the Federal Government announced that Leonora's detention centre - along with three other centres on Australia's mainland - would close by the end of February.

For Good Samaritan Sister, Annette Dever, a parish pastoral worker in the communities of Leonora, Laverton and Leinster since 2003, the presence of the asylum seekers has been positive and enriching for the broader community.

It's also had a "great impact" on her.

"Their presence will be part of this town forever. They're history now; they've been here and they've been part of this town."

"They will stay in my heart forever. I'll pray for them especially, and of course, all other asylum seekers as well."

Annette said the asylum seekers reminded her of "the silent neighbour at our door".

"We don't know them very well - the silent neighbour - but God is asking us to be aware of them," she explained. Continue reading.

Source: The Good Oil

Image: The Good Oil

Described as, "an intense man who wears thick black glasses," he was until recently a climate-sceptic and feared that the message of activists would cause his people to lose faith in God and the Catholic Church.

A group of young climate-change activists based on Tarawa, who travelled to outer islands to educate people about the effects of climate change, were not welcome on Abaiang.

But now his 30-year-old church is flooding during storm surges. As its foundations have begun to give way, so has the priest's opposition to the science.

Martin says, "When it was first mentioned about the dangers of climate change, I was not believing myself in global warming. It was said that the ice on the North and the South Poles was melting. But I was not a bit concerned about it. But now I accept that climate change is happening and it's destroying a lot of goodness in the land we now have in Kiribati."

He now tells his parishioners about climate change: "It is not God's curse, but a blessing in disguise." This is because, Martin says, the youth of Kiribati will have better opportunities in their lives by being forced to leave the islands and atolls for other countries.

Elsewhere in Kiribati Good Samaritan Sister, Sister Marella is trying to increase the harvesting of rainwater into tanks and to stem the frequent wastage of fresh water by the inhabitants on Kiribati.

She has seen misguided aid projects do serious damage in Kiribati. Sixteen months ago she wrote of her frustrations in a newsletter published by her order, the Sisters of the Good Samaritans. One aid project installed solar-powered water pumps in household wells on an outer island of Kiribati. The new technology rapidly over-pumped the wells, causing the underlying salt water to rise and contaminate the whole of the fresh-water reserve, rendering it unusable.

Then, several hundred pit toilets were shipped to another atoll, to help it meet the United Nation's much-lauded Millennium Development Goals, which aim to halve by 2015 the numbers of people in the world without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. But the pits of the toilets were unsealed, resulting in faeces draining directly into the fresh-water reserves just below.

Source

• The Global Mail
• Image: The Global Mail

She is employed by the government of Kiribati to help address that country's critical water needs caused by the rising sea level and the increasing salination of drinking water. One of the threats of rising sea levels is contamination of the fragile fresh water lens that lies under the islets ringing its atolls.

Sean Dorney, the ABC's Pacific Correspondent, has made a video report showing find out how Marella is helping to solve Kiribati's critical water needs as a water engineer.

Marella is a Good Samaritan Sister from Australia. There are two communities of Good Samaritan Sistes in Kiribati They are engaged in a variety of ministries: primary education, youth ministry, and working with people with disabilities and mental illness.

• View Dorney's report
• Read Transcript
• Image: UNICEF

"It was probably one of the most transformative experiences of my life." says Sister Veronica. She says the simple lifestyle with limited access to resources challenged her to look at life anew and realise "how little you actually need to survive in this world".

What began as a short-term ministry placement for Veronica, teaching theology at the Kiribati Pastoral Institute (KPI), quickly grew into something much more.

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Image: The Good Oil