By Anthony Barich
DAWESVILLE Catholic Primary School and its adjacent parish have adopted a school on an island with over 16 volcanoes in the eastern Indonesian archipelago.
Dawesville’s Catholic community has joined nearby Assemblies of God,
Baptists and other Christian denominations in the Eastern States to
adopt the school situated in a village called Zeu on the “Catholic”
island of Flores.
Dawesville Catholic Primary School (DCPS) has personally spent up to
$5,000 funding school uniforms for the 150 students, a volleyball court,
sporting equipment and the conversion of a storeroom into a principal’s
office.
DCPS’ founding principal Steve Dowie will use his six months’
professional renewal leave and long service leave in July to help teach
English at the Zeu school with his wife Jenny, who is also a teacher at
Dawesville.
Dawesville’s Catholic community will soon help Zeu access electricity,
having already helped it to access clean water as well as assisting with
the construction of the school, four teacher houses and a toilet block.
St Damien’s parish priest Fr Leon Russell visited Zeu recently with
local St Vincent de Paul conference president Vince Spargo while six
teachers from DCPS visited last July. Flores has a Carmelite monastery
of nuns and, according to Mr Dowie, has “seminaries all over the
island”. Nuns from the nearby city of Bajawa will also start teaching in
the Zeu school later this year.
“Without a doubt, the whole environment is Catholic. The liturgy is
Catholic and [Fr Maximus, a Salesian priest from Bajawa] now comes to
celebrate Mass there once a fortnight in the village, which is great for
them,” Fr Russell said.
Zeu is the central congregating place for Catholics of eight surrounding villages who unite there every fortnight for Mass.
Mr Dowie said a local priest told him Flores has more seminarians than
anywhere else in the world. Up to 90 per cent of the island’s 1.5
million population is Catholic, the product of Portuguese missionaries –
the only one of its kind in the Indonesian archipelago where most
people are Muslim.
Mr Dowie has also enlisted the help of the Leschenaultia St Vincent de
Paul Society and would like to enlist any school in Bunbury, Perth, “or
Australia for that matter – they need a lot. They’ve got next to
nothing”.
Fr Russell said the project is a “great spiritual outreach” for
Dawesville’s parish and school community, as it is badly needed by the
Indonesian island. “One boy from Zeu walked over 5km every day just to
attend school at Bajawa, so building a school in the village has made
life easier for them,” Fr Russell said.
ALSO AT ST DAMIEN’S CHURCH…
THE
newly opened and dedicated St Damien’s Church in Dawesville has started
three hours of adoration of the Blessed Sacrament every Friday.
Parish priest Fr Leon Russell said the benefits of adoration, which was
started by parish laypeople, are “obvious” to the parish, and attendance
is “gradually picking up” though presently it mainly draws the older
generation.
“It fosters the sort of prayer life that allows God to be more present
among the community, especially in families, and helps model good
Catholic people,” Fr Russell said.
“It creates the sense of climate in the church itself as a place of
prayer – which in many ways it already is – but it adds to a certain
culture and demeanour (that is befitting for a Catholic church).”
The Blessed Sacrament is exposed in the church every Friday from 9am to midday, followed by Mass.