Work of the JMV in Tole, Cameroon

Tole is a poor village of about five thousand inhabitants, situated in the administrative capital city of the Southwest Province of Cameroon, and also under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Catholic Diocese of Buea. In this village called Tole, one cannot but see the different faces of poverty and the poor.  This is a village suffering from the neglect of basic human necessities. A village which has no future prospects for its young.  A village where every child’s dream in life ends up in becoming a peasant farmer, as there is no means of going to school. They are hungry and malnourished people.  It is a village where diseases of various kinds have gained as their own territory, thereby subjecting its people to death as there is no hospital or health care institution around to intervene.

The youth, in reaction to these miseries befalling them and in an attempt to sustain their younger brothers and sisters who are dying of hunger, engage themselves in crimes. Should this be the reason for the alarming rate of forced prostitution, child slavery and stealing? This anxiety and struggle for survival have totally erased in their minds the sense of solidarity, prompting them to become selfish in thoughts and actions, and corruption reigns at its peak. The worse is that the surrounding towns and villages consider Tole as a damned place and inhabitants now become outcast. Nobody wants to hear you talk about Tole.

But if everybody rejects Tole, we the young children of St. Vincent de Paul cannot reject this village, with all its inhabitants seeking to find relief for their problems.