July, 2005
Letter from Burkina Fasso
Dear Father Kevin and the Christian people of Holy Family,
First of all I would like to send you warm and sincere wishes on the occasion of the Golden Jubilee of Holy Family Parish in this year 2005. Long may Holy Family parish continue!
Our Community at Burkina Faso shares your joy and asks the Lord to send many blessings to the Parish, to each one of you, your families and the people who live around you.
We are immensely grateful to you for the financial help that we are receiving from your parish community as a result of their Lenten collection.
May I introduce our Community to you?
We are an international community of five sisters, two Congolese, two Rwandan and one French.
The Bishop of Diebougou very much wanted to have a monastic community in his diocese and in January 2001 our Order responded to the desire by sending two sisters to Burkino FasoBaforto look for a suitable site for the a monastic foundation.
We found such a site, 20 hectares in the village of Bafor, which is about 300kms. south-west of Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkino and near the border of Ghana.
Soon we will be moving into the first part of the monastic buildings but there are still the Church and the community bedrooms to be built as well as the guest house where we hope one day to welcome you, Father Kevin, and your parishioners.

You would all be very welcome not only to the monastery but also to Burkino Faso, a name that means “Land of Integrity"
To finish this rather long letter let me tell you something about the Diocese of Diebougou where we have been so warmly received.
It was founded in 1968 and it is a diocese, which is very much alive even though followers of the traditional Animist religions are more numerous in the area. In fact, throughout Burkino Faso there is a great religious tolerance and I have noticed that in our Diocese Animists, Muslims and Christian get on very well together.
Our Diocese is also blessed with many vocations to the priesthood: there are more than a hundred priests at the moment and the majority of them are young.
There are also many vocations to the religious life so please pray that the Lord will send some of them to the Bernardines.
We will remain very united to you and the people of your parish and we thank you again for your very generous gift
With the love and prayers of the Sisters, Sr. Philomene