Courtney McGrailReligious congregations are active across Ireland working to help the neediest and newest members of our society, writes Sr Eithne Woulfe SSL
Sr Eithne Woulfe SSL
Gay Byrne last week launched the 150th anniversary of his Alma Mater, Synge Street Christian Brothers School, in Dublin’s Mansion House. A much smaller school now than when the broadcaster was a boy, and without any Christian Brothers teaching, it is noted for its multicultural student body and repeated successes in the Young Scientist Competition.
The school’s buildings also host an interfaith hospitality centre in which 68 different groups meet and share culture and faith, with language classes and support being available. The adjoining Life Centre offers alternative locally-developed educational chances for young people.
Synge Street’s story is typical of many religious and their institutions in Ireland today, active in local community projects and setting up initiatives reaching discreetly out to the neediest and newest members of our society and helping them stand on their own feet.
Education with a difference
iScoil, a Presentation Sisters alternative educational provision, is for young early school leavers between 13-16years. Since 2009 it has worked with over 200 young people. Students on iScoil work towards Junior Cert FETAC Level 3 certification with online teachers. The programme wraps around each youth’s individual needs, allowing some students to work from home, while others work in centres that host community iScoil learning hubs.
The Presentation sisters stress that young people who participate in iScoil’s collaborative approach to education are disengaged not from learning but from “a system that does not suit their needs at a particular time in their lives”.
The Holy Faith Sisters’ St John’s Education Centre in Glasnevin has since 2002 sought to help pupils in danger of exclusion or of dropping out of the system. Its six week programmes afford them time out so they can be helped remain at school. When they return to school they continue to be supported as do their families and the schools themselves. It is not surprising that demand far outstrips available places.
Although some teaching staff are paid by the State, without the centre’s 24 volunteers and the12 retired teachers who offer dedicated weekly slots, its wide range of support services would struggle. These services include a leadership programme for former pupils, a drop-in centre, the training of a parent network team, and a parent line as well as a communications programme for parents and counselling for all the parents/ guardians of students on programmes.
It remains a work in progress, with Antoinette Keelin CFC saying that while much has been achieved, “we are still learning”.
Similar initiatives have emerged across the country, often reliant on the voluntary service of religious and associates, working with professionals to afford new ways of realising dreams of a future through school and college education for people who believed the chance had passed them by.
Bridge-building
Religious involvement in development education programmes is becoming more popular, with Anne Jordan SSL of the St Louis Institute saying it was through contact with the Congolese community and asylum seekers in Monaghan that she became aware of need for such programmes in schools and in society generally.
After answering an advertisement for volunteers to befriend a Congolese family, she was assigned a family of thirteen – a grandmother, two parents and ten children. Much support the family needed involved practical matters such as applying for and paying for phones, reading and explaining communications from schools and hospitals, and acting as intermediaries with landlords and welfare officers, as well as helping with legal difficulties.
“I don’t see much evidence of integration in the neighbourhood,” she says, explaining that adults – especially women – still struggle with English, Swahili continuing to be the preferred language at home. “Balancing the need to be true to one’s origins and adapting to the new culture is not easy,” she says.
Development education projects take many forms. Among them is Challenge to Change, aimed at young people attending schools in the Presentation network, seeking to bring about a greater understanding of global inequality and to allow young people see the impact of a changing global environment.
The project aims to empower them by exploring ways in which their actions at local level can impinge for the better on such issues as human rights, fair trade, and exploitation. It hopes to bring about a heightened awareness, a social consciousness and a broader vision and appreciation of developmental issues.
The project’s vision is driven by the Presentation charism and ethos that urges work with the marginalised and excluded. Human rights and social justice are central to the Presentation mission, and 32 schools participating in the project this year will be addressing issues as varied as AIDS, child labour, homelessness, and sustainability. Projects will be displayed and discussed at the Challenge to Change Seminars on April 30 and May 12.
Immersion opportunities
As well as raising awareness, religious schools in Ireland work directly with schools elsewhere in the world. Loreto schools across Ireland, for example, actively support a sister school in Rumbek, South Sudan. The school was established in the embryonic war-torn country in 2008 in response to the Loreto Sisters’ Courage to Move call.
Over 400 children study in Rumbek’s growing primary school, while the boarding school struggles to ensure its 185 girls complete four years of secondary school in a culture where they are married in exchange for their ‘cow value’. Although teachers are generally untrained and poorly educated, this year two have gone for teacher training while others attend training during school holidays. Among the school’s signs of hope are the eight classrooms currently under construction.
Immersion opportunities that involve pupils and staff staying in another country and school are widespread across religious congregations. The potential value of such programmes is best summed up by a participant:
“I expected to feel a resounding pity for the people. But I did not for it is only material wealth they lack. In all other aspects they are wealthy beyond imagination in their faith, friendships and relationships, their sense of giving and generosity and above all their happiness which rubbed off on me, for I have never felt as happy as during those ten days in Zambia with people I will never forget”
Paula Goggin of Ursuline Secondary School in Blackrock, Cork describes the Ursuline Irish-Kenyan Immersion programme as “transformative”, while students and parents from Dublin’s Spiritan-run Blackrock College continue their commitment to establishing a new school in Kenya, with some parents and current sixth years travelling there this summer.
All the time, of course, the work of religious in faith development such as RCIA and other initiatives and the support of new school trusts continues in collaboration with lay colleagues and clergy, but that is for another column.