Beloved Friends and Colleagues!
- Today is another opportunity to get across to you. It is the 2nd Sunday in Lent, in keeping with our cherished Catholic tradition. As you well know, Lent is a 40- day -period of renewal, reconciliation, and peace. Peace with God, with the self and with neighbors. It is a period we decide to make amends and chart new courses for our lives. I wish each and every one of you, a good time of interior recollection, identifying your imperfections and deliberately charting the course of their remediations.
- Let us not miss on the point of action, to avail ourselves that opportunity of grace to reap the fruits of the Lenten season, namely a season of grace and intimacy with God. One sure way of gaining on the matter is to will to do things differently, to avoid the old Adam in us and chart new and better courses of life.
- Just like we continue to admonish Staff, to pay attention to the situations of others around you. No one is an island and what affects others around you have their impacts in your own very life. You cannot afford to be indifferent.
- I give you one concrete example, where your indifference can be deadly. We have accepted in principle and in practice that every Staff should be paid his or her salary on the 25th of every month. And we have the guarantee of the funders to put such money into our hands before that date. What on earth would prevent us from ensuring that all processes are completed before that due date. Yet we experience, not occasionally, unexplainable gaps in that regard. In fact, does it not pain you, that for your negligence or otherwise, or for one protocol or the other, someone did not get his or her salary as and when due. And there was not communication to such a Staff, for weeks and months. Yet you have received yours and would be expecting more?
- Going forward, I write and direct, that each time, I get to know ,that someone, Regular or Ad hoc Staff, for one reason or another, without due consultations and communications, did not get his or her salary, at the appropriate date, someone or some people MUST pay the price in hard coins. Kindly spare our organization that bad name and the consequent lacerations.
Other important Concerns:
- The Plenary Meeting of the Bishops Conference has come and gone. We thank you for your prayerful support.
- We pray and encourage Staff to observe and respect the sacred spaces of everyone, especially our female folk, and of course all persons, in their distinctiveness and dignity. Each person has a right to his or her privacy and private spaces.
Shalom
Sincerely yours in the Service of Caritas!
