Helping Youth for a Better Future

For three years now, Grace Catholic has partnered with the parishioners of St. Maximilian Kolbe (“St. Max”) to assist our brothers and sisters in Uganda.  This year we will once again reach out and help with Holy Angels College (HAC), a school for the poor.  The school’s student body is the equivalent of our grades 8-12.  They have a goal of growing the student body from their current size of 269 students to 400 students to make the school self-sustaining financially.  While St. Max is working on the new dorm as a Lenten project, Grace Catholic is committed to working toward all of the schools goals long term.

We want to help everyone understand where they have been and where they are now.  For poor families, education is a way out of poverty where the school is the steppingstone before a trade school or a university degree.  Starting in 2018, St. Max parishioners helped build two dorms, one for boys and one for girls along with a well for drinking water and a way to capture water for bathing. Each year since then, small, and large donations provided for solar, bibles, a science lab, computers with Internet and the starting of a library for the school along with tuition assistance for the poorest families.   Today in 2024, there is still a need to assist and support students of the poorest families attending the school.

One of the reasons for dorms was due to children walking long distances; especially in the dark of night.  Parents were especially concerned about the girls being attacked.  When the first dorms were completed, there was joy among the parents and students for this great gift.  Due to the growth, they now have more girls wanting to attend school and they have used a makeshift classroom to accommodate them.  St. Max is focused this year on completing the dorm on the new property donated by the bishop to resemble the ones currently in place (St. Max Lenten Project).  It has a structure but needs to be completed and furnished with windows, doors, a roof, ceiling and water.  This will allow the girls to occupy the current boy’s dorm, which is bigger and furnish more beds for the growing population of girls and have both dorms next to each other for the girls.

The second project is to complete the wall around the school to provide more protection to the school.  The parents have made this a priority and have completed 600 feet of the wall.  The goal is to assist them in completing the wall.  This will protect the students, teachers and staff and the current structures St. Max has helped put in place over these past five years.  It will also help with the next project to assist with food.

Food prices have soared in Uganda much like everywhere else.  The principal must go out almost weekly to try to secure food at a reasonable price to meet the needs of the school.  At times, this has been very challenging.  There is a need for much more.  As the wall is completed along with the new property, they will be able to plant more crops to assist with the overall cost of food purchases and supplement the current staple of food which is primarily rice, beans and corn.  The wall will help keep local cows from eating the crops, which has been a problem to date.  The hope is to purchase a section of land, put a well on it to assist with irrigating crops and assist students with more food during the year beyond the bare minimum.

The other projects support the basic needs of the school; 1) complete the library, and 2) purchase lab chemicals and tools, 3) textbooks along with agricultural tools and 4) more computers and solar to meet the new Ugandan government mandates to maintain and operate the school put in place in 2022.  In America schools receive government funding for some of this.  In Uganda, a Catholic private school must provide all of this and adhere to any new regulations the government mandates.  It has continued to be the generosity of St. Max parishioners and others that has allowed this to date.

Our hope is that the projects listed below will allow the school to meet these requirements reducing the cost to run the school long term by growing the student population.  The proposal is the following:

No amount is too small and there will be opportunities to purchase one part of each project to achieve the goals.  We hope you might consider helping this parish and school to show your support for our brothers and sisters in Uganda with both your prayers for them and financial support.  Fr. Henry Agit, the twinning ministry in Uganda and the parents want all of you to know how grateful they are for what has been done so far.  They tell us they pray for everyone here constantly.  Pray and consider what you can do to help!