Worldwide Child Sponsorships

In South Africa we accompanied the Dominican sisters at Oakford Priory in the province of Natal for more than twenty years. After the sisters left Oakford Priory at the end of 2009, we now support two projects of the Mariannhill Missionary Sisters of the Precious Blood in the Eastern Cape. "St. James High School", with around 580 pupils, is a secondary school with a girls' boarding house in Cofimvaba in the Eastern Cape (geographically between Durban and Port Elizabeth), where up to 250 girls are cared for and supported by Sr. Josepha Mpopiya. The "St. Vincent Home" is an orphanage where around 100 children and young people, some of them HIV-positive, are cared for and educated in small groups with great affection.

From 1995 to 2024 we also supported a home for people with disabilities in Bronkhorstspruit, South Africa, founded by the South Tyrolean Father Karl Kuppelwieser and now run as the "SIZANANI Children's Home". The home is for children with physical and intellectual disabilities, who receive the best possible support from a team of local helpers.

In Brazil, more than twenty-five years ago, Father Eckart Höfling — a Franciscan priest from a village near Lohr — established community centres in two favelas (Vila Ideal and Prainha) on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro. These centres run exemplary day-care facilities for children, now led by the Dillingen Franciscan sisters and by the diocese. The sponsorship funds are administered by the directors, most of them religious sisters, and benefit all the children in their care in whatever way is best suited to each child.

In Pakistan the sponsorship funds are administered by a Belgian religious sister and, since 2021, by project leader Saifuddin Mithaiwala. The primary and secondary schools educate around 390 children whose parents cannot meet the costs of essentials such as textbooks, prescribed school uniforms and shoes, medical check-ups, additional support for learning difficulties or school outings. The girls' boarding house can accommodate up to 95 girls.

In Uruguay, in the capital Montevideo, our contacts are Father Fabián Silveira and Zulma Fierro. They have taken over from the late Father Otto Brand, who worked in Uruguay for thirty years — first as a parish priest, then building up an extensive aid programme and running a school. The sponsorship funds support children in and out of school, cover the cost of healthy food and clothing, and help fund their schooling and vocational training.

For many years our contact in Uruguay was Father Otto Brand, who died there on 28 February 2014 at the age of 83. With great foresight he established the "Father Otto Brand Foundation" in Montevideo in 2012, which is now carried on by his successor Father Fabián Silveira and the current president Zulma Fierro, who had worked alongside Father Otto Brand since 1992.

In Argentina, from 1990 to 2018 Deacon Hermann Schweikart and his wife looked after the sponsored children in Oberá. Since 2019 we have supported the CIDIN child-sponsorship project, founded in 2005, in Posadas, capital of the province of Misiones, in cooperation with the Kindermissionswerk in Aachen. There more than 95 children and around 35 families are cared for by a doctor, a psychologist and several social workers. At the centre — the "Centro Integral de Desarrollo Infantil", or CIDIN for short — the children receive additional tuition, the parents take literacy courses, and topics such as hygiene, healthy nutrition and water treatment are addressed.

In Sri Lanka we have supported orphaned children since 2006, in the wake of the tsunami. "St. Vincent's Home", run by the Hünfeld-based order of Oblates (Oblati Mariae Immaculatae), lies some 60 km south of Colombo. It is home to 130 boys aged eight and above, who, after their schooling, also receive vocational training. Alongside general technical skills, the home teaches carpentry, motor mechanics, electrical engineering and printing. The project produces rubber, coconuts, bananas, bricks and candles, and runs a printing operation.