Greetings dear readers. It is with great pleasure that I can report we now have a very good supply of new sewing machines for our Tailoring students at Padri Vjeko Centre. Thanks to the goodness of the Croatian Catholic Mission in Vienna, Austria our school has acquired twenty-seven new manual/treadle sewing machines and eighteen industrial straight stitch machines! This is wonderful news because, as you perhaps already know, our tailoring students make up 154 of our almost 500 students at the Centre!

The Croatian Catholic Mission in Vienna collected money during the four weeks of Lent this past year. Then they invited me to come to Austria where I was given their donation to our school. We try very hard to have enough equipment, tools and supplies for our students to practice their trade, and now with these new machines, we will be able to teach a larger group of Senior 5’s who are going to be in Senior 6 this next year.

It is very important that the students who leave our school have all the necessary skills to find employment in order to support themselves and their families. You see, dear readers, jobs are few and far between and we have a good success rate for our graduating students, which makes us very proud of what we are accomplishing here at Padri Vjeko Centre. It is with great pleasure that we often hear from our students who have finished their studies, when they inform us that they have found work.

So we truly want to thank the good donors from Austria who have done so much to make this happen. This school year we had sixty-four new students apply for our tailoring program and with these new manual/treadle machines, we were able to give each student a machine on which to make their sewing samples. And by having the industrial machines we are able to prepare our more advanced students for work in a clothing factory if the opportunity arises, plus the machines are very strong and will continue to work for years to come!

This is what happens when good people think of us and the work we are doing here in Africa. And this will go a long way towards helping the youth of Rwanda to have a better future for themselves and for their families. We are truly blessed by this generous gift!

Edited by Valerie Kae Ken