Christmas celebration with the children of Labuan Bajo (December 2013)

“This Christmas we had a very successful Christmas tree. The children were really happy and had plenty of fun and of course enough gifts. Our gifts this year were kindly supplied by Chris and MaryAnn Argall of Brisbane. You can imagine what joy these generous gifts contributed to these many kids. The celebration had its own problems. We had rain on that same day, the rain started at 9 am and went nonstop until 2 30pm. We had prepared a simple tent made of bamboo and tarpaulin. It all fell because of the heavy rain and we had to bring all the children to the apostolate building. As you can see in the photos they are squeezing into one room during mass time but during lunch and gift distribution we used several rooms (where the children are sitting down). Due to the rain we had only 237 children on the 21st but many others came to the monastery the next day. We fed them and gave them gifts as well.” – Bro. Emmanuel Kagaba, Mission Superior