St. Gabriel’s Gugulethu

Hello, my name is Fr. Luigi Benigni. I am Italian but in 2012 was sent to South Africa to be a missionary. In 2018 I was ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Cape Town. Currently I am the administrator of St. Gabriel's Catholic Church in Gugulethu, Cape Town. Gugulethu is one of the poorest areas of this diocese and this city. The area of Gugulethu during the time of apartheid was designated as an area where only Blacks could live. These areas were always looked down upon by the old government, what this meant is that they forcibly moved people to this area, but also that it was far from everything, far from Cape Town, far from many different services which resulted in an area of extreme poverty. Today while the situation has improved markedly from before 1994, when apartheid ended, it is still poor, which very limited services and a lot of poverty of every kind. Covid was a hard time and the upkeep of the parish suffered accordingly. We are now in need to redo all of the gutters of the parish and to fix up some of the roof. The gutters need to be changed because they are made of asbestos and with the major storms which hit the area and due to their age they are falling apart. We have a non-profit daycare on the parish grounds. So to protect the children of the area, but also the parishioners it is urgent to have them all fixed. I humbly ask for your help, we need to raise about $8000 to pay for the safe removal of the old gutters and installation of the new ones. Ndiyabulela kakhulu ngokulunga kwakho, thank you for your generosity.