Asher Kaufman, age 18, set out on June 28 for a yearlong trip to help spread the Children's Rosary in Europe and Africa. He spent the months of July, August and the first two weeks in September in France. He arrived in Uganda on September 15. From Uganda he traveled by car to Rwanda on September 28. After a week in Rwanda there was once more a return for more travel in Uganda. On October 11 he arrived in Tanzania. Asher grew up helping the Children's Rosary and participating in it. He now is helping to spread the Children's Rosary to more parishes and schools. He is also discerning a vocation to the priesthood and has applied to the seminary through the Archdiocese of Hartford. Please keep both his trip and his vocation in your prayers. He has been sharing dispatches from the trip.
"My visit to Fr. Ruwaichi’s was a very pleasant one. We prayed with the Children's Rosary groups at the local parish one evening and met with Monica Mwacha(shown above), a teacher of Swahili at a secondary school in the diocese that has worked on the Swahili translation of the small, yellow Children’s Rosary book. We are moving forward with its review and printing, which is very exciting. It is well known that it is always better to work in the vernacular language when attempting to spread an effort such as this, and many people I have spoken to here are excited at the prospect of the book being in Swahili.
Fr. Ruwaichi’s parish has a few groups that meet in outstations, but they all came together at the central church on account of my visit to pray together. We gathered in front of a grotto of Our Lady, which I found to be a very nice application of the grotto. Fr. Ruwaichi (shown directly above) also had a Children’s Rosary banner, which he unfurled for the meeting.
My visit to Fr. Ruwaichi’s parish was only about two days long since he had retreat for the priests of the diocese to attend. He was very hospitable during my time there, and I was glad I had been able to visit him.
After he dropped me back at the diocesan offices in Moshi on Friday, October 17, I met up with Fr. Jared Cleophus from Kenya. Fr. Cleophus has helped us a great deal in spreading the Children’s Rosary in Kenya and Tanzania. We traveled with him back in 2019.
That evening, he and I stayed at Fr. Emmanuel Lyimo’s parish in Mrao. We had visited Fr. Lyimo in 2019 as well, and since he has been sent to a new parish since then, Fr. Cleophus and I helped to initiate a new Children’s Rosary group at his current parish. They will meet every Sunday after the morning Mass.
During these first few days, we had some unexpected drama in the form of the delivery of the barrel sent out to Tanzania in May. It was supposed to arrive in Moshi on Friday from Dar es Salaam where it had arrived by boat such that Fr. Cleophus and I could pick it up and begin distributing the rosaries as we traveled. Instead, the delivery was pushed back to Saturday, then to Monday. Realizing we would soon be moving on to the next location, we became alarmed at the prospect it might just slide down to Wednesday or Thursday with no barrel in sight. We called the company, and upon finding out that no one seemed to know where the barrel actually was, we were given the number of the truck driver. Then a long chain of chaotic calls ensued in which we were given the number of the truck driver who was bringing the barrel only to find out that he had given it to another truck driver to take. Upon contacting that man, we were passed off to still a third truck driver, from whom we learned that the barrel had actually been taken about two hours past Moshi to a city called Arusha. They agreed to take it back to Moshi for Monday, and so we drove down nearly an hour and a half from Fr. Emmanuel’s parish to meet it. When we talked to the men in the truck who were dropping it off, we found out that if we had not hounded down the long line of drivers to figure out where the barrel was and arrange for the drop-off on Monday, the truck was about to take it ten hours back to Dar es Salaam from where it had started!
We took the barrel back to the diocesan offices, divided up the rosaries, packed them into Fr. Emmanuel’s car and set off to his parish.
That evening we went to visit a very nice nun named Sister Pelagia who runs a catechetical program for children on the weekends. She is a Holy Spirit sister, and she asked us if we could find some time to visit her community to initiate the Children’s Rosary. We happily agreed, so we made plans to come by again to help initiate the Children’s Rosary once the children were there.
The next day was the day we set off for Dar es Salaam for a meeting with Archbishop Thaddeus Ruwa’ichi. When I was with Fr. Sheejan, he had helped me to book this appointment. It would be a long bus ride, eight hours long, but I will save that journey for the next post."
To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE
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