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 and on October 26 traveled to Kenya. Most recently he reached Madagascar on November 7. 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.
"At the school of Our Lady of La Salette that I mentioned in my last post, Fr. Faly (the school head and a La Salette priest) was so kind as to grant me the use of of all the Religion classes for the school for a few days. In this way, by visiting the various classes during their religion class slots, I was able to visit nearly all of the classes and pray the Rosary with them. As of this writing (on Wednesday, November 19), I still have two classes to visit on Friday afternoon.
In each of these visits, I have been able to not just pray the Rosary with the children but help them to come to appreciate it more and see its importance. This is work that was less necessary when I was in Kenya or Tanzania because most of the children there already saw the importance of praying the Rosary. However, here in Madagascar, the children are not as accustomed to praying the Rosary themselves.
In each class I went to, I would talk for a short while on the Rosary, the children would write their intentions. and then we would knell down together and pray it, with the children leading the prayers.
It was very nice, staying at the La Salette shrine a short walk from the school and being able to walk down the dirt lane to the classes every day. The place is surrounded by pine trees and very quiet.
On Friday, evening, Fr. Bertrand came to pick me up to bring me to the house where he stays because I would be visiting a parish and school that were closer to him than to where I was staying at the time. The parish and school are both named St. Therese of the Child Jesus, and there are right in downtown.
But first, on Saturday morning, I went with Fr. Bertrand to visit some nuns called the Good Shepherd sisters. He went to their house to celebrate Mass. Their order helps women in bad economic situations to care for their children, and they even operate orphanages. As it happened, they have a group of children that comes to their community every Saturday for prayer and catechesis, and they invited me to come and pray the Rosary with them next Saturday. I was very happy to accept their invitation because I really have much respect for the kind of mission they are undertaking. It is not easy work, and yet the sisters take it on with joy and zeal.
That afternoon, I went to address the students in the catechesis program at the parish of St. Therese of the Child Jesus. As I arrived at the parish and prepared to enter the church where the children were gathered, I realized I had not given much thought to what I would actually say. I had been so preoccupied with the events of the morning that I neglected to think of what I would say.
As we walked up to the church, I asked the priest how long he wanted me to speak for, thinking he would say about fifteen to twenty minutes or so. "Oh about an hour and a half should be fine," he told me.
"Do the children have any other program for catechesis today besides me if I take less than that time?" I asked. "No," he said. "They've just come to hear you today, and then they'll go home."
Upon proceeding into the Church, I saw the pews packed with children all the way to the back; hundreds of young faces looked expectantly in my direction, and my eyes fell on a table that had been placed in front of the altar with two chairs and a microphone. At that moment, those chairs and the microphone looked as imposing as if I was walking up to a podium in front of a stadium of 40,000 people.
I realized I would need to surrender what I would say to God and just trust that He would bring the best out of this. I don't remember much of what I ended up saying, except that it consisted of the importance of a developed prayer life, of the intercession of the Virgin Mary (the priest had asked me to speak on this), and thus the importance of the Rosary.
When I had talked long enough that the children were beginning to get restless, I decided it was time to start the Rosary. As we knelt down and various groups came up to lead the decades, I heard the hundreds of throats behind me eagerly reciting the prayers and saw the kneeling figures as well. I was very grateful at that moment for how the event had turned out. Everyone seemed happy to see the children pray in this way, and it only remained to coordinate the proper time to have them meet on a regular basis.
Meanwhile, I had not neglected the school next door either. Earlier that day, I had gone to meet with the sister in charge of the school (for the school was run by the La Salette sisters). Since I had Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday open of the next week, as well as Friday morning, she invited me to come and lead the Rosary as I had done at Our Lady of La Salette School.
This is what I have been doing, visiting many classes and leading the Rosary. I am glad to see the students' reactions as well as those of the teachers and facilitators. Knowing myself why I find the Rosary important, I have been gratified to share this with others and see them come to the same conclusion. One other providential occurrence was that recently I was able to meet the bishop of Ihosy, Bishop Fulgence Razakarivony. Ihosy is a city to the south of where I am. My mother had met this bishop in Rome in 2022 during the World Meeting of Families. He happened to be passing through Antsirabe on his way to Ihosy from Antananarivo. He was happy to see me and interested in the Children's Rosary, which hopefully we will collaborate on further." To see all of Asher's dispatches from his journey click HERE
