austraLasia 775
SUMBA MISSION (ITM) - A SPACE TO WATCH, THANKS TO KIND BISHOP
SUMBA (Indonesia): 20th December -- The Salesian Vice Province of Indonesia Timor has a good news story to tell. Last year, a small community set up on the island of Sumba, located in the Lesser Sunda Chain (East Nusa Tenggara) in South East Indonesia, a hair east of Bali, in micro terms! And now the Bishop of Sumba, Bishop Kherubim Pareira SVD, has come up with a wonderful gift for the Salesians to be formally handed over on the Feast of St. John Bosco: 9 hectares of land. The Salesians plan to transfer to this land the existing carpentry workshop with boarding house, an enlarged Salesian residence (there are presently just three confreres there) and the formation house, be it a novitiate, prenovitiate or both.
Bishop Pareira, it turns out, is a past pupil of the UPS where he studied pedagogy. He is clearly delighted with the Salesian presence in his island. Sumba's population of some 350,000 is mostly Christian, a mixture of Catholic and Protestant.
Sumba is a beautiful island amongst many beautiful islands in the archipelago, perhaps not on everyone's radar screen (no crowds!) but beginning to attract surfers from 'downunder'. It retains much of its traditional culture. For the Salesians it is nicely situated between the centre in Jakarta and that in Dili and close enough to Denpasar (just a short flight away), accessible from almost anywhere in the world by major airlines.
