By Fr. Timothy Elliott
After three decades of periodic questing for project funding and volunteer helpers, Bishop Rowell set up in 1983 an office to coordinate this work. Relations with agencies for resources and recruitment were cultivated.
Besides advertising our requirements, we report on the use we make of the help we get. This needs to be of a standard to satisfy the expectations of donors overseas and from different cultures. The setting up of this webpage is part of our strategy to acquaint donors with our range and extent of activities for their interest and support.
Our vision is to sustain and develop our many services, particularly in their training facilities. We aim towards localising diocesan staffing. For those who follow us we want to prepare viable projects in good shape, and appropriate. With pastoral work, health work, timber husbandry, mechanical services, agriculture, education, justice and peace services and communications, we foster the training element and the facilities for simpler management.
RECRUITMENT
Our recruitment policy is to invite overseas volunteers to train their local understudies as technicians and co-ordinators. Agencies in regular contact.
Over the years we have dozens of volunteers from sending agencies in Australasia, Europe (Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germant, Holland, U.K. and Ireland), Canada, and U.S.A.. Many of these sending agencies are church-related, but several are offices of governments: Australia, New Zealand, Canada,U.S.A., Ireland, U.K., Holland, Germany, and Austria. While we have had many religious missionaries from parts of Asia, we have had no Asian lay-volunteers so far. In forty years so many returned volunteers worldwide have maintained links with our diocese and with each other. This group is called AITAPE ASSOCIATES.
FUNDING AGENCIES
Each agency has its own priorities, and it is accountable to its donors or other funding source. We approach the with submissions for our needs which match their varying guidlines. Pastoral eg. health, ed, civil leadership animation. Among our range of initiatives we seem to have something or other for most.
For our pastoral and church related needs we go to Pontifical Missions Societies, Rome, to Epicospal conferences, Religious Orders and several generous archdioceses or dioceses.
For various development programs several European Catholic offices are open to our submissions, also the church groups indicated above.
We accept our onus to justify any submission
We have divised this Webpage to give donors access to our range of works in the logic of their relationship to each other. This is only a beginning and we invite constructive comments for its updating and better cohesiveness.
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN RESOURCE OFFICE AND REHABILITATION COMMITTEE
Resource Office mandate is ongoing, to care for the needs of diocesan works throughout our three deaneries, coastal and inland. In the instance of the Tsunami, our work was confined to restoration of churches, pastoral residences and centres which were not covered by humanitarian donations.
Rehabilitation Committee was set up by the bishop, as an ad hoc measure to cope with the calamity of the Tsunami. Its mandate gave it autonomy to deal with all humanitarian works generated by the disaster, matrial and psychological. Material reconstruction is well in hand, but psychological rebuilding (wok sambai) will take longer.
AITAPE DIOCESE AND DEVELOPMENT
Our Franciscan training was primarily pastoral, and we remain pastors. But as we developed the coastal stations we were allotted, and particularly as we moved into uncontacted regions behind the Torricelli Mountains, physical skills became an evident need for us and for the new people who were our hosts. With every new station, a school would spring up, also some sort of clinic. Basic building skills would be acquired by the young priest and shared with his helpers. The rough access track between villages would be realigned by local request and hard work. and mostly a landing field would be levelled. This pattern, which emerged naturally from our daily contact with our people soon formed the departments of our Diocese: Pastoral, Health Work, Education and Technical training and services and Communtiy Services too.
For each activity we formalised our training programmes.
Then for each field we support the post-graduate improvement of those with promising talent and dedication. These are the Activities for which we mostly seek funding.