Just an update for you all

Hello my friends -
Well things here are starting to ramp up.

Our new AA group is meeting at the Fr. Gabriel Roerig Parish Center on Saturday mornings and it seems to off to a great start.

Our CCD program seems to be pretty well set and, when you add in RCIA, bible studies, Adoration, . . . our week will be very full. All of this will crank up the first week of OCT.

Next week we will be travelling to Nassau for our monthly 'Pastoral Day' where all the clergy of the Bahamas come together for a day of prayer and community. This one will be unique in that the Archdiocese of the Bahamas is implementing VIRTUS, an educational program for clergy and those that work with youth about protecting children. This is a program the Archdiocese of Boston implemented years ago and I have already taken the class twice - but I'll be doing it again here. Nassau has not had any cases of clergy sexually abusing children but this will do a good job of educating us about the issue and protecting our children.

Usually when we go to Nassau for this meeting we stay Wed-Fri and enjoy time away and get some shopping in for those items we cannot get on Andros. This will be a Tue-Wed trip however because of other things on our schedule. For example, when we did RCIA last year we had two women who have crazy schedules. The result was that when Easter came around they were months behind in their classes and we felt it best to defer their acceptance into the church. So - all summer long we have been doing make-up classes to catch them up. Then we have 3 new people who want to begin RCIA this year. So we will have the new people on Mon night and the catching up people on Wed night. The end result is we do the Mon night class, fly to Nassau Tues morning, shop on Tues, attend the Wed Pastoral Day, then fly back to do the Wed night class. Run, run, run.

The following week CCD starts so our weekly schedule will be
Monday afternoon - grades 7-9
Monday night - RCIA for those from Fresh Creek
Tues afternoon - grades 10-12 (our confirmation class)
Tues night - RCIA for those from Cargill Creek
Wed afternoon - grades 1-6 from Fresh Creek
Wed night - RCIA makeup from last year
Thurs afternoon - grades 1-6 from Cargill Creek
Friday - we saved for ourselves (except for 1st Fri Adoration and Bible Study the 2nd and 4th Friday evenings and a need to do homily prep for the weekend)
Saturday should be finalizing the homily prior to the Saturday weekend liturgy
Sunday is full with 3 liturgies from 8AM until 4 PM

It will be interesting to get back into all this after taking a breather over the summer
Keep us in your prayers.

On a lighter note - fruits and veggies on Andros seem to come in all at once. What I mean by that is you will have weeks of Mangos - and nothing else, but Mangos are everywhere. Then its cabbages, then sappodillies, then onions, etc. You get swamped with gifts of that one particular produce, from everyone (and I do mean swamped). Right now its avacados - they grow them huge here and they call them pears. These avacados are all delivered, sold, or give away, rock hard. They are inedible - but a week on the window sill and they are delicious. The problem is that you go from zero - to 12 really ripe avacados all at once. And the gifts keep on coming.

When we first arrived here 3 years ago I planted a pit near a sea-grape plant that was on its last legs. The sea grape is long gone but the pit took root and is now 3-4' tall. In another year or two I will be picking my own avacados!

The same thing happened with a mango pit - although I think this pit was just tossed aside by one of our children. It landed under a bush by the front of the church and now it is taller than I am!

My last bit of news is related to the community in North Andros. The Archbishop has given us permission to build a chapel there called Our Lady of Hope. I did some research on Our Lady of Hope and found the National Shrine to Our Lady of Hope in the US is in Tewksbury, MA. It turns out this was a devotion fostered by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (OMI). Coincidentally, the OMI's used to be located at St. Jean de Baptiste parish in Lowell, MA - the host parish of St. Joseph High School for Boys on Merrimack St (where I went to High School).

I sent them an email explaining what we are doing and they sent a packet of prayer cards and booklets explaining about the apparition of Our Lady of Hope in France. We have distributed them to our local folks and I will be giving some to the Archbishop when we see him next week. God is amazing!!

Next week I will be meeting with contractors to try to get a sense of how much a simple chapel would cost to build - nothing more that 4 walls and a roof. The community in No. Andros has already donated enough to clear the land and put in the foundation but we clearly will need to do a development campaign to add those four walls and a roof. I'll let you know what I find out.

Enough for now - keep us in your prayers
Deacon Frank Tremblay