FATHER PEDRO OPEKA
A heroic Argentine priest in Madagascar
Father Pedro Opeka, a Pauline Argentine missionary who has been working since 1975 in Madagascar, was awarded the 2007 BLACK WORLD Award to the Fraternity. On the edge of a landfill, he began to build houses to house the homeless. Today it is a city with about 20,000 inhabitants.
His name is Akamasoa, which means “good friends”. It is equipped with nurseries, schools and training centers.
Father Opeka, like a good Argentine, is a great soccer fan. Born in 1948, he has spent more than half of his life working in Madagascar. This passion for football is now contagious to the kids who swarm, well dressed and fed, in the different schools that brighten up the city of his dreams and efforts: Akamasoa.
Son of Slovenian emigrants, he was born in San Martín, in the province of Buenos Aires in 1948. He always saw in his father, who was a bricklayer, a model of effort and work. For him, without work nothing is achieved. He started working with his father when he was 9 years old. At the age of 14 he was already an official mason. His mother had 8 children and his father worked a lot. They gave him life and passed on their faith.” On weekends, and despite the fact that Pedro preferred to play football, he began to go to construction sites with his father. There, with a lot of initiative, he learned the trade. to Madagascar and began to work with his hands, people were surprised, he told them: “I have two hands like you”.
At the age of 17, he built his first house in Junil de los Andes, among the Mapuche Indians, and since then he has not stopped giving dignity to the poorest. Especially since he started his job at Akamasoa, which means “good friends”.
He entered the congregation of Saint Vincent de Paul in Argentina. He studied Philosophy in Slovenia and Theology in France. At the age of 27 he was ordained a priest and was assigned to Madagascar.
His first experience in Madagascar took place in Vangaindrano, in the southeast of the country. He spent 15 years animating the parish and there he began to feel the need to be with the people. He grew rice to survive, wading through the mud like any Malagasy peasant. With them he played football, becoming a star of the local team. According to himself, “football was the way to gain their trust and feel among them”.
It all started in a dump. In 1989 he was assigned to the capital, Antananarivo, to take care of the Pauline seminary. When he saw the misery of the people, especially on the outskirts of the city, with more than 800 families digging through the garbage to eat, he told himself that there was no use talking there, that the pertinent thing was to act.
It started with a small shelter for the boys, a home of just 16 square meters on the edge of a 20-hectare landfill on which 5,000 people lived.
With a small group of volunteers from his former parish, he started on a small two-hectare piece of land, donated by the municipal authorities. There he built the first houses, a small town called Manantenasoa, which means “the hill of courage” in the Malagasy language. Little by little, wooden houses were built, which would later be rebuilt with bricks.
From the granite of the mountain he began to extract stone, gravel and cobblestones, to sell them for construction. From the dump he also began to take out natural fertilizer, which he also sold. Little by little, what had first been a youth hostel became a small neighborhood, then two, until it reached the city it is today, where almost 20,000 people live.
Primary and secondary schools began to be created… Currently, there are more than 7,000 students, not counting nurseries. There are also school workshops (carpentry, mechanics…) that train and employ young people; workshops and schools of embroidery, crafts… in which women not only learn a trade, but also earn an income that helps them survive.
Little by little the hills surrounding the dump were filled with beautiful houses, made of bricks and pleasant to live in. What used to be a landscape of rubbish and filth was transformed into a real city, with gardens, flowers, paved and clean streets. That was called Akamasoa (“good friends”, in the Malagasy language).
Fr. Opeka has the help of Manos Unidas, the European Community, the Principality of Monaco and many other international institutions. Slovenia and Monaco proposed him years ago for the Nobel Peace Prize. He has received numerous international prizes and awards, including the Medal of the Legion of Honor, the highest French distinction.
Akamasoa is today an example of cooperation and solidarity. For all his work and for this example of cooperation and solidarity, Mundo Negro (Comboni Missionaries) decided to award him the Mundo Negro Prize for Fraternity 2007.
His constant work in favor of the poorest has led him to be nominated again for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2016.
Source: Black World Magazine of the Comboni Missionaries, nº 526.
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