Mission in Madagascar
On 28th September 1975, Pedro Opeka was ordained priest in Buenos Aires and was nominated responsible of a rural parish in southeast Madagascar, Vangaindrano.
In 1989, his Lazarist superiors nominated him director of a seminary in Antananarivo, the capital. But when he saw the dump from the hills of the city, he discovered people rummaging among garbage to find something to eat and sleeping in huts made of hemp propped between mountains of waste. Pedro Opeka began talking to them, to convince them that they could leave that misery and abuse, for their children. With the team of young people he had trained from Vangaindrano, he wrote after long discussions the articles and statuses of Akamasoa ('good friends' in the local language)in december 1989.
Father Pedro simply had no money and started it all with €900 he borrowed from various christian missions.
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“We never can tell how our lives may work to the account of the general good, and we are not wise enough to know if we have fulfilled our mission or not.”
—Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842–1911)