The Order of the Holy Cross had begun a partnership with its community in 1998, soon after it arrived in South Africa to found a monastery at the invitation of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. During the brothers’ first Holy Week in South Africa, on Maundy Thursday, three boys who attended the woefully inadequate farm school across the road were playing in the fields supervised by a teenage caregiver while their mothers were at work. They strayed onto a train track and were hit by a train as it came around the bend and was unable to stop.  Two were killed, the other severely injured. The brothers tended to those who grieved and sought a response in exploring their calling and their Rule: “Love must act as light must shine and fire must burn.” 

An afterschool program followed in an unused monastery building to compensate for the deficiencies of the farm school and provide, at the very least, adequate afterschool supervision. The beginnings of a primary school came along soon afterward. A proper facility to house grades K-3 came along soon after in 2011. It was the fruit of partnership—partnership between the North American and South African houses of the Order, the Order and the Diocese of Grahamstown, and the Order and its rural neighbors. Eventually it became a partnership between the Order and Love Must Act. A six-step plan emerged:

1. Stabilization—Financial and administrative (August 1, 2017 through December 21, 2022)

2. Enlargement: Constructing appropriate facilities for current and future needs (January 1, 2018 through December 31, 2019)

3. Expansion: Adding one additional grade per year through Grade 7 (January 1, 2019 through December 31, 2022)

4. Sustainability (January 1, 2019 through July 31, 2023)

5. Replication: Building a network of Holy Cross school to implement the best education practices in other areas of need.

The first three steps have been successfully completed.  We celebrated the first group of students to complete Grade 7 in December 2022.  The fourth, we realize, may take more time than we had first thought.  We are working on that now.

The school serves an overwhelmingly disadvantaged community, with nearly all of its students coming from households making below the national living wage and nearly one- fifth coming from households with at least one deceased parent. Through its utilization of a proven education model and its rooting in communities of love, however, it consistently meets the standards of some very elite schools indeed, although at a far lower cost.

The teacher-to-student ratio is 1:15 as compared to the South African national average of 1:32, and two-thirds of its students are female, far above average.  The school’s absenteeism rate is 2.24%,one-quarter the South African average.  All students have textbooks, surpassing the South African government school average by nearly 50%. Teachers are compensated at a rate comparable to South African government employees, a key to attracting and retaining top talent.

This is what Love Must Act’s partnership model accomplishes. The success of the project serves both the North American partners, who gain an opportunity for spiritual renewal through relationships with people who are poor, and the overseas partners, who gain spiritual treasure as well as the opportunity to fight material poverty through educational opportunity in their community. (The overseas partners served are not just the vulnerable and at-risk children and families of Makhanda, but also the community workforce that benefits from job opportunities–teachers, administrators, nursing and social workers, cleaners and maintenance workers, and drivers, to name a few–and from the education of future members of a more-skilled workforce.) Our goal is always for all partners to experience transformation together heart to heart and hand in hand.

The success of the Holy Cross School has made it our model. That’s why step 5 is Repeat elsewhere!

Although it is significantly different in many ways from Holy Cross, our first repetition elsewhere is the St. John Ophthalmic Nurse Specialty Training Program in Gaza, where at the moment, of course, the work is even more challenging than usual. 

It is the oldest and only charitable provider of expert eye care in the Middle East, treating patients regardless of ethnicity, religion or the ability to pay. In that work is carried forward a venerable tradition of what Love Must Act exists to exemplify.

The Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem originated in a hospice dedicated to St. John the Baptist and founded around 1070. It is worth noting that the hospice was founded in the wake of the Great Schism, which divided Eastern and Western Christendom and before the Crusades began. The brothers and sisters of the Hospital led by a religious brother known as the Blessed Gerard, acted on their faith by caring for the poor and sick of any faith. Indeed, Gerard led the community  in prayers “for our lords the sick and the poor.” All received treatment and care at the highest standard in ways reserved at the time for the nobility, including private beds and access to privies. In time, the prayer for our lords the sick and the poor became prayer to our Lords the sick and the poor, suggesting a most profound understanding of the sick and the poor as profoundly identified with Jesus, an insight that continues to inspire Love Must Act. The community was  recognized as a religious Order by the Pope Paschal II in 1113. In 1540 the Order was suppressed in Britain with other monastic and religious institutions by King Henry VIII. It was restored and recognized Queen Victoria and an Order of the British Crown in 1888. The founding of the St. John Eye Hospital is contemporaneous and has been a British charity ever since, expanded to include supporters all over the world, including the Priory in the United States of America of The Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St John of Jerusalem.