How the Movement came about
About Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone: In the past, Sierra Leone has suffed from slavery, and now is suffering as one of the poorest nations in the world.
The Republic of Sierra Leone is a country of 71,740 km²,slightly smaller than Hokkaido, Japan with a population of approximately 4 million. For a long time it was a British colony. Since most of the population make their living by inefficient agriculture or day-by-day businesses and do no have the means to make good use of the country's abundant mineral resources, the economy lags behind.
Our Encounter with Sister Negishi
The founder of the Movement first learned about Sierra Leone in July of 1980 when Sister Leticia Michiko Negishi returned to Japan from there for a holiday. For a long time Sister Leticia Negishi had been working at Our Lady of Guadalupe, a school run by the Clarissan Missionary Sisters in Lunsar, a town in Sierra Leone.
We were touched by her devotion, and at the same time shocked by the poverty the people were living in, and began our aid, first by sending education funds.
The people in Sierra Leone are the wounded traveler that we come across as we walk along the path of our life.
This is true, but we are not able to help the country of Sierra Leone as a whole, nor help the town of Lunsar itself. There are things we can and cannot do, right?
However, there are things that we can do as individuals or small groups.
And that is exactly the kind of international aid activities that Lend A Hand Movement takes part in. The base of our activities is in the aid that we send in the form of money, which each one of us earns from working in Japan.
As a rule, we do not send personnel overseas, but instead cooperate with the sisters or others who are already working there. It is a cooperative work between the sisters who are committed but have no funding, and those of us who cannot go abroad but can help financially.
The following were our specific aid activities. (We will explain the reason for the use of past tense at the end of this section.)
in my 1980 worship notebook, from when I was teaching at Tamagawa University, I found some notes that I took when I first heard Sister Negishi's story about Sierra Leone. The notes are not dated, but I believe I wrote them in July of that year.
The story was printed in the September issue of Tamagawa University's "Zenjin Kyōiku Shi" the same year, and I remember having been very shocked at learning about the reality in Sierra Leone, a country I did not even know existed until then.
July 2000
Representative of Lend A Hand Movement
Masaaki Sato
And so, the circle of assistance spread throughout Japan from 10 to 20 people, 20 to 100 people, and from 100 to a few hundred people, under the name of "Lend A Hand Movement" since 1983.
