Report from Bangladesh

Thanks to the support of Bro. Gabriel Mondel (National President of Bangladesh), Bro. Joseph Pandian and I visited Bangladesh March 9-15, 2007. Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world, with a population of approximately 147 million confined to an area of 144,000 sq. kilometers. Bangladesh is predominately Muslim (88%), with only 300,000 Catholics (0.3%). The condition of poor people is much worse than I
saw in Cambodia.

We visited four of six Catholic dioceses: Dhaka, Khulna, Rajshahi, and Dinajpur. Because of the distance, we could not visit Chittagong and Mymensinh. We traveled over 1600 km in five days to visit our SSVP conferences. We had meetings with three regional councils, one area council, eight conferences, and over 200 SSVP members.

Bangladesh has over 220 SSVP conferences. Only 40 are properly aggregated, and they are Twinned with the Australian National Council. The conferences are quite active. Those not receiving Twinning monies are still serving the poor. They raise their own funds by collecting palmfuls of rice and eggs from their parishioners and selling them to help the poor. We heard good comments about the conferences from their relevant spiritual directors and parish priests. They all claimed that they could do more for the poor if they had more support from overseas. All Twinning monies are now remitted to the account of the Archbishop of Bangladesh and distributed almost evenly among the six dioceses.


I had a chance to meet all the bishops of the six dioceses at the Bishops Conference in Dhaka. They were very impressed by our trip to their dioceses, as no International Council members had visited before. They still had some reservations about our SSVP National Council in Bangladesh and suggested that more formation should be done among our members. I distributed $2500 amongst the bishops to support SSVP work in their dioceses and $2500 to Bro. Gabriel Mondel of the National Council of Bangladesh for their work for the poor.

Regards,

John Lee

Territorial VP, Asia