FORT SMITH — When Marcie Mask went to Mass at Christ the King Church last October, she found the answer to a prayer.
Mask had been looking for a project that would unify her 105 seventh-grade religion students, who had come to Trinity Junior High School from three different feeder schools — Immaculate Conception, Christ the King and St. Boniface.
A guest speaker, Father Jerry Morgan of the Christian Foundation for Children and Aging, gave a Stewardship Sunday presentation during each Mass. CFCA is a lay Catholic organization, based in Kansas City, Kan., that assists 310,000 children, youth and elderly people in 24 countries in Africa, Asia and the Americas.
About 273,000 sponsors participate in CFCA’s ministry. The sponsorship model allows participants to exchange letters and photos and pray for one another by name. Each year, CFCA sponsors Mission Awareness trips to the countries in which it hosts projects, allowing sponsors to visit their sponsored child or elderly person, meet his or her family and see how their $30 a month contribution provides food, clothing, medical care and education.
Katie Brugger, a seventh grader who heard Father Morgan speak, said, “When I heard the priest from the foundation talk at Christ the King, he said that life was very hard in Central America, and that there wasn’t a whole lot to eat.”
Mask’s other seventh grade students were also interested in helping a teenager in another country through prayer, financial assistance, friendship and correspondence.
Community service is part of Trinity’s mission, and students are required to earn a minimum number of service hours each year and encouraged to go above and beyond the minimum requirement. The seventh-grade project, which encourages mission awareness and stewardship, is part of that commitment.
Mask decided to challenge her seventh-grade classes to contribute the monthly sponsorship fee. Their progress toward reaching the monthly goal of $30 is tracked on the whiteboard. In November and December the students collected $65 total.
Information and a picture of their sponsored child are displayed prominently in the classroom, and the students pray for Ernesto Lopes Garcia, their sponsored child, each day. Garcia is a 14-year-old from Guatemala, who lives with nine other family members — his parents, grandparents, one brother and three sisters — in a wooden home with bare floors. The home has a water supply but no electricity. His favorite subjects in school are language arts and science. He has a number of health problems, including anemia and bronchitis, but he loves to play football. He attends CFCA’s Chumumus School in the Hermano Pedro project in Guatemala.
Only 43 percent of Guatemalan children attend secondary school because education is only mandatory through sixth grade. Most teens are needed to help in the fields and cannot afford school fees and uniforms. Because of his participation in CFCA, Garcia is able to continue his education.
On Jan. 21, Mask’s students wrote their first letters to Ernesto.
“I think Ernesto would like us to write about what our schools and churches are like, how we eat, what sports we like and what our culture is like,” Augustine Nguyen said.
Bo Helmert, looking forward to Ernesto’s first letter to the religion classes, said, “When Ernesto writes us, I hope he will let us know how the money we sent helped him at school and at home with his family.”
Mask, who posts updates on the student project on Edline, accessible through Trinity’s Web site, has been inspired by the students’ exceeding their goal each month and expects that interest will grow as this overseas friendship develops, continuing throughout the students’ junior high school years.
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