The first landfall due west of Australia, the largest island nation, is Madagascar, the second largest.
They are about the same size in population – Australia has 27 million people and Madagascar has 31 million. Both are on the World Bank’s leader boards. Australia is one of the richest 15; Madagascar is one of the poorest 15.
Fr Pedro Opeka, who visited Sydney recently on the eve of the 50th anniversary of his ordination, knows all about poverty in his adopted country.
A 77-year-old Argentinian missionary, a Vincentian priest with a Slovenian background, he has spent the last 36 years living and working on one of Africa’s largest and most polluting rubbish tips, on the outskirts of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital.
His visit to Sydney was well-timed. He left Antananarivo shortly before the airport closed during the latest revolution and on the day that Dilexi te, Pope Leo XIV’s apostolic exhortation on God’s love for the poor, was published.
Poverty in the rubbish tip of Andralanitra, the “city of flies”, is not the kind of poverty to be found in Australia.
More than 3,000 waste pickers work there, mostly women. They earn about five Australian dollars a day, or less.
The conditions are brutal – suffocating smells, toxic gases, smoke, rats, flies, stray dogs – and there have been outbreaks of cholera and bubonic plague.
This is not Hollywood’s Madagascar.
Fr Opeka describes it as “extreme poverty”, poverty that sucks the soul and spirit out of a man, poverty that sucks the hope out of him. It is a jungle where only the strong survive, where violence, theft, prostitution, and drugs are everywhere.
His life’s work has been bringing hope to these men and women and their children.
It is called Akamasoa – a Malagasy word for “good friends” – which he started in 1989. The idea was to draw them out of these inhuman conditions, to a place where they could live with dignity, with a roof over their heads, a job, and education for their children.
In the countryside, he helped establish self-sustaining villages.
“We thought that work and the countryside could cure them and make them escape the circle of despair, begging, delinquency and crime to which they seemed destined,” he says.
Today Akamasoa has several centres around Antananarivo and in the provinces. It has helped half a million Malagasy; 5,000 houses have been built, and 25,000 people live in its villages.
About 15,000 people around Akamasoa are sending their children into its schools.
Each village has schools and a clinic. They provide work in quarries, masonry, carpentry, agriculture, and crafts. These days about 21,500 children attend Akamasoa’s schools and vocational training centres.
It is, he says, an oasis of hope.
The secret to its success is the old maxim, give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, and you feed him for life. At Akamasoa people find jobs – not handouts.
It was not an easy road. The key was gaining the trust of the people, Fr Opeka says. It took years.
He lived among them, sharing their lives, until he was able to convince families that there was hope, and he continues to live with them.
Is this liberation theology at work, The Catholic Weekly asked Fr Opeka. He was speechless for a moment. “No, it’s the Gospel. I have never said that this is my work. It is the work of God. I am just a messenger who brings the message of God that nothing done for God is lost. Nothing.
“When you live with dignity, you can think clearly and remember that there is this spiritual dimension in people. In Madagascar, there is a proverb that says it is the spirit that makes the person – not your wealth, not your diplomas, not your beautiful house, not your car. When it is based in the spirit, there is hope.”
“All of us must let ourselves be evangelised by the poor and acknowledge the mysterious wisdom which God wishes to share with us through them,” Pope Leo XIV writes in Dilexi te.
Fr Opeka agrees and said that Australians have a lot to learn from the poor of Madagascar.
“The people of Akamasoa can teach the people of Australia and of wealthy nations a simpler, more joyful, more cheerful life. They also teach us perseverance. They have nothing, truly nothing, and yet they want to work, they want to move, they want to get on with life.”
After Melania Trump, Fr Opeka is arguably the world’s best-known Slovenian.
The governments of Slovenia, Madagascar, and other countries have nominated him four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.
It’s not something that interests him. “The Nobel Prize is very political. I’ve received dozens of awards – well, it’s not me who received them, it’s the people of Akamasoa who received them.”
After all these years, the work of Akamasoa is changing the lives of whole generations. “Among the 950 teachers of Akamasoa, 500 are the children of parents who came to ask for help 36 years ago; this ensures the succession of Akamasoa,” he says with some pride.
Madagascar is a biodiversity hotspot and its growing tourism industry focuses on its unique flora and fauna.
But one unlikely attraction in the capital is Sunday Masses at Akamasoa, full of prayer, song and dancing, attended by 8000 people at a time.
Pope Francis loved it when he visited in 2019. “Akamasoa is an expression of God’s presence in the midst of his people who are poor,” he said at the time. It is the fruit of “a faith that made it possible to see opportunity in place of insecurity; to see hope in place of inevitability; to see life in a place that spoke only of death and destruction”.
Australia is not a major donor to the work of Fr Opeka and Akamasoa – “a drop in the ocean”, he observed wryly. But he says donations are desperately needed to help create jobs.
“Helping is already a grace that comes from Heaven; if I have something more, it is a human duty to give,” he says.
