The “Reina del Mundo” (Queen of the World) school in La Molina (Peru) is an institution of the Congregation of Missionaries of St. Vincent de Paul of Hildesheim that recently celebrated its 50 years of presence in Peru; they are a very beautiful branch of our Vincentian Family:

The Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy of St. Vincent de Paul of Hildesheim owes its foundation to Bishop Eduard Jakob Wedekin (1849-1875), who, encouraged by the charitable works of the Sisters of Charity of Paderborn and the supplications of the Pious Association, asked the Motherhouse of Paderborn three sisters for the care of the sick and poor in Hildesheim. On June 11, 1852, Sisters Teodora Franzen, Laurentia Tschallener, and Eugenia Beckers began to care for the sick and the poor at St. Bernard’s Hospital in the Karthaus building.

Following St. Vincent’s motto: “Let us give ourselves to God to announce the Good News throughout the world”, our Congregation accepted missionary work in Peru in 1967. The Sisters who work in this mission bear the name of “Missionaries of St. Vincent de Paul”.

Since 1970 our Congregation has been a member of the newly founded Federation of Vincentian Communities that have their origin in Strasbourg.

The school has a website and a facebook page full of interesting information about its functioning, mission and values. But it was a small note on its facebook that caught our attention: the initiative to sell chocolates to help the indigenous communities.

The message on the social network reads like this:

A group from Frau Garibaldi’s Secondary School classroom recently returned to the Cacaosuyo factory to pack the 1,000 bars of chocolate they made earlier, in order to sell them and collect funds to help the development of the indigenous communities that plant the cocoa.
Many communities still lack infrastructure and have very poor education. Boys from II, IV levels and a high school student from V collaborated in the design of the package.
On the day of the achievement they will explain the production of this chocolate from Cacaosuyo and they will sell their own product: SCHOKOGOLD.

True to their German roots, they have called the tablet “Schoko,” which is precisely “chocolate” in German.

We know that many similar small initiatives are carried out every day, all over the world, by members of the Vincentian Family, on behalf of the most vulnerable members of our societies. In this case, the initiative that has involved the secondary school students in favor of the development of the indigenous communities that produce cocoa is praiseworthy.

Do you know of similar initiatives in your area? We would like to make them known. Tell us about them!: