As I mentioned at the end of last week, Dennis Kiyimba and I accompanied seven (an extra – John – joined the team at the last minute, which turned out to be a real blessing in terms of his help in translating into Arabic) youth from Torit to the St. Joseph Diocesan Youth Center in Ikotos. This will be the location of the Bread of Life Diocesan Eucharistic Youth Retreat at the end of May. All of the youth belong to the parish choir, and so sang almost the entire journey from Torit to Ikotos. That fact also helped us teach them 5 or 6 of the 20 or so new praise and worship songs we hope to use on the retreat. They were extremely open and were eager to know Jesus better, to understand the Scriptures, to pray and to have the courage to give witness to their peers. The purpose of the retreat was two-fold: to deepen the youth’s own spiritual lives, and to help prepare them to serve as part of the team for the retreat in May. And so the talks and activities alternated back and forth between spiritual and practical topics. It was the first time that several of the youth had experienced Eucharistic Adoration.
The final activity of the weekend was a showing of The Passion of the Christ for anyone from the Ikotos parish community who wanted to see it; about 100 turned up, and many of them were moved to tears. We stopped at the large cross on a small mount in the community where the parish worships in a makeshift shelter to take some photos before returning home. A few local children plucked up the courage to climb up to see what we were doing, and one even allowed me to take his photo. The village of Ikotos can be seen on the plain behind and below the boy and the group photo on the edge of the mount.
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