“This project emerged in my life as an inner healing, which I always needed. I had a very hard childhood”, reports, with serene voice, Sister Domingas, as is tenderly known the founder of the Children Charity Work of Santa Isabel (OCSI), an entity officially created in 2002 to look after needy children, adolescent and youths of communities of the periphery of Luanda, Angola’s capital. The African country still tries to recover from a civil war that lasted almost 30 years and ended practically at the time of the foundation of OCSI.
In this third video of the series recorded by the team of Fraternidade – International Humanitarian Missions, during the help it brought to the OCSI, Sister Domingas says that, even having had a very difficult childhood, she always looked after other children. Already as a child, she promised herself to, when she grew up, she would do something to avoid that at least one child had to suffer what she was suffering. Promised kept. OCSI, whose focus is education, has benefitted more than 24,000.
Currently, in the Casa da Criança Orphanage, one of the entities under the OCSI umbrella, and the one that received help from Fraternidade, are 120 children and adolescents up to 18 of age, not all of them Angolese. The institution also attends children from other African countries, who find a big mother there, as everyone considers Sister Domingas. “The first fifteen children who lived here were a fruit of the war”, she remembers in this first part of the interview to Fraternidade – we will soon publish here at the website more reports of Sister Domingas, which show how all of her life was dedicated to the needy orphan children.
