Yarram is a small town on the sea in south-east Victoria. Hyderabad is a big provincial town on the edge of the desert in south-east Pakistan.
The Mini-Vinnies conference at St Mary’s Primary School in Yarram have knitted a warm connection with St Elizabeth Hospital in Hyderabad and its Mobile Medical Outreach Programme.
The Mini-Vinnies at St Mary’s was started five years ago by Debra Owens, one of the teachers at the school and now twenty children belong to it. The Mini-Vinnies are primary school-based conferences of the St Vincent de Paul Society and enable the Society’s motivation of being compassionate to those in need to be passed on to a younger generation of Australian Catholics.
The St Mary’s Mini-Vinnies make blankets which are given to children of utterly poor agricultural labourers in Pakistan. Making the blankets means that the Mini-Vinnies themselves are actually engaged in providing help to Pakistani children in need.
Each year I carry bags of the blankets from Yarram to Hyderabad where they are collected and distributed by the staff of the Mobile Medical Outreach Programme at St Elizabeth Hospital. The Mobile Medical Outreach Programme provides primary health care every year to 50,000 people who live in distant rural and desert areas. Eric Siraj, director of the Mobile Medical Outreach, says that children in these areas suffer not only from malnutrition but also from the extreme winter cold and this is a major reason for the very common respiratory sicknesses that the children have. Very few of the settlements where their parents live have electricity but even then no-one can afford heating. Any wood that is available is used for cooking.
The blanket cover that the Yarram Mini-Vinnies is giving makes a huge difference in the basic need for warmth and care that infants and young children near Hyderabad have. The Mini-Vinnies do a 'hand-out' but it is a hand-out of blankets made by their own hands. It’s a blanket cover-up of kindness and compassion from children to children.
Columban Fr Robert McCulloch resides in Rome as the Procurator General for St Columbans Mission Society.
Related links
- Read more from The Far East - September 2017
