Food, gifts and rain – An early Christmas for the Saburai children, Timor Leste (November 2018) – Mission for the Poor: Serving the people of Flores and Timor Leste

Trevor just returned from Timor Leste after spending a week with the brothers in Maliana visiting several poor communities. During his time there they visited the community at Saburai. Saburai village is at the base of Saburai Mountain which is roughly 8 km south of Maliana, very close to the Indonesian border. The village runs in a line along the northern side of the mountain at a mean elevation of 900 m. With Br David, Trevor visited Saburai on the Saturday, for a feeding program for 100 children of the village, and to give each child a gift bag containing several gift items. Thus, for each child we had two notebooks, a pack of 12 colouring pencils, an eraser, a pencil sharpener, black and blue ball point pens and an item of underwear.

The feeding program went very well but just as we were about to give out the gift bags, around 1 pm, heavy rain began to fall, and continued relentlessly into the early evening, so consequently the gift giving was postponed until the following day. The next day, we managed to give out the gift bags just in time before the rain started again, but it was a success with the 100 children taking home a special gift bag, each bag containing several gifts bought up from Australia. It was a joy to see the faces of the children and their parents as they received their food and gifts. The MOP brothers provide regular feeding programs for these children of the village who are the poorest of the poor in the village. Until the MOP brothers arrived in Saburai several years ago, these children lived in an environment of leprosy. Thanks to the brothers organising and providing the correct antibiotics, leprosy is now almost eradicated from the community.

Hope you like the photos!! Next time we will visit the Labuan Bajo mission for some recent developments there.

Blessings always

Trevor and Tina