Loss of Lanka’s beloved Jesuit Fr. Paul Caspersz by Alex VAN ARKADIE
Rome,
Monday, 01 May 2017
I share the grief upon the earthly loss of Lanka’s beloved Jesuit Fr. Paul Caspersz. May he Rest in the Eternal Peace of the Lord. (vide attachment).
I gained his valuable acquaintance in the mid-1980s when coordinating with SATYODAYA Kandy to solicit and thereafter secure approval (from our Donor Agency comprised of staff of the U.N. FAO-Rome) financial help for the Kap-Ela Youth Farm Project in Polonnaruwa, Sri Lanka.
Thanks to the consistency, visionary leadership, and guidance of Fr. Paul, the project had a unique success story from its inception. To abide by the strict requirements of our Fund, Fr. Paul led the people’s campaign to legally acquire for the Rural Youth Farm the block of land by a Crown Grant (announced by Govt. Gazette). An overseas Telegram to the Fund simply read, “Land Grant received. Deo Gratias, Fr. Paul Caspersz” !
His efforts led us to design and obtain funds for a few other community welfare projects focused for the benefit of plantation worker families in the Hill country. From a successful project he formulated for the ‘Supply of Drinking Water’, the marginalized poor were introduced to benefit from a back-yard fruit and vegetable farm project from which, within a single year, participants earned a subsidiary income by selling produce at nearby markets and soon thereafter contribute to their own community Revolving Fund.
When I last met Fr. Caspersz well over a decade back in Kandy, he kindly took me to their Satyodaya Library to which I had dispatched (without count, and from time-to-time) stocks of Academic material released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (UN-FAO) on food, agriculture, bee-keeping, poultry, fisheries, and livestock raising (including disease control, post-harvest losses, small-scale gardening, rural savings, micro-financing, income-generation from backyard and school gardening campaigns, improved nutritional food production, marketing and storage techniques, water conservation, inland fish farms, dairy farms, marshland and inland aquaculture, responsible fisheries, co-operatives, and people’s partnerships programmes, etc.).
Convinced of the technical value of their multi-disciplinary research contents, Fr. Paul told me that SATYODAYA has begun to transfer their excess stocks of FAO’s Publications to the University of Peradeniya so that they may become more readily accessible to a larger majority of our University Academics.
Briefly and to conclude then, I wish to bear witness here the learned author’s affirmation of the character, qualities and far-sightedness of our beloved Jesuit Fr. Paul Caspersz, whom many acquaintances would agree remained among us as a vibrant socialist ‘missionary’ even upto this 21st Century.
end.
