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The Saint John Mission is the missionary branch of the Saint John Catholic Church, an autonomous Catholic Church registered in the United States. In other countries of the world, so as not to create a conflict between us and the Roman Catholic Church, we are known as The Saint John Church and legally registered as such.
None of our clergy receive a salary from our church. All the money we collect goes to support the work we do on behalf of others.
To support themselves, our clergy work. And they are also the most generous contributors to the ministries of the church.
Even the hierarchy of our church work to support themselves. Our Archbishop, the primate of our church, drives a truck carrying hazardous materials to support himself and his family. The Chancellor to the Archbishop (that's me) works as an Internet Marketer.
We follow the example of St. Paul. He didn't accept money from the church for himself. Rather, he supported himself, most probably through tent-making.
Though we have plans to branch out into other countries, our missionary work at present is concentrated in Burundi, Africa, and mainly with the Batwa people.
Burundi is a landlocked, resource-poor country with an underdeveloped manufacturing sector. The economy is predominantly agricultural with more than 90% of the population dependent on subsistence agriculture. Economic growth depends on coffee and tea exports, which account for 90% of foreign exchange earnings. The ability to pay for imports, therefore, rests primarily on weather conditions and international coffee and tea prices. The Tutsi minority, 14% of the population, dominates the government and the coffee trade at the expense of the Hutu majority, 85% of the population. Since October 1993 an ethnic-based war has resulted in more than 200,000 deaths, forced 450,000 refugees into Tanzania, and displaced 140,000 others internally. Only one in two children go to school, and approximately one in ten adults has HIV/AIDS. Food, medicine, and electricity remain in short supply. Political stability and the end of the civil war have improved aid flows and economic activity has increased, but underlying weaknesses - a high poverty rate, poor education rates, a weak legal system, and low administrative capacity - risk undermining planned economic reforms.
The Batwa people in Burundi count for around 1% of the total population and are among the poorest of the poor there. Traditionally, they used to support themselves by making pottery and hunting. However, a number of factors changed their way of life for the worst. There are no more forests for them to hunt in and the modern way of life has brought Burundian people to use other utensils for their cooking instead of pots.
The Batwa are landless and use to lead a nomadic lifestyle. Now, they find themselves in a very difficult situation; they are confined in terms of mobility and have no contemporary skills with which to make a decent living. Furthermore, very few of them have had any formal education.
The Batwa are a pygmy people and it's very hard to be a pygmy in Burundi. For years, they were discriminated against. It was unheard of to share the same food with them, and intermarriage was a very rare and dangerous thing.
Incidentally, pygmy people are often not as short and as small in stature as Westerners often think they are. The Batwa tend to be about 4 1/2 to 5 1/3 feet tall. And they are thin, mainly because of a lack of food to eat.
Today, the Batwa live in even more extreme poverty than the rest of Burundi, and they suffer hunger daily.
For things to change, Batwa children need schooling, but they don't have school supplies. It costs about one US$ a month to send a Batwa child to school there. That is a lot of money for a Batwa to raise. When they can get work, they often work in rice fields, 12 hours a day, to earn the equivalent of five cents (USD). And they run the risk of stepping on land mines while doing so. Burundi is a land that has been ravaged by civil war and land mines are prevalent.
Last year, we were able to send all the Batwa children to school and provide lunch for them. For many of them, that lunch was the only meal they had to eat all day.
This year, we will do the same, though our donations are down. As always, my wife and I will make up the deficit.
If you would like to contribute, please go to:
http://www.saintjohncatholic.org/burundi.htm
All contributions are tax deductible in the United States.
We ask for money, rather than material contributions because it is very hard to keep things from being stolen when you send them to certain African countries. We send the donations by wire to our bank in Burundi, and our priest there uses every penny of it to buy school supplies and food for the children. Once the needed items are purchased, he distributes them directly to the Batwa with the help of our seminarians there.
-Rev. Dave
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