About the FST Sisters
The Daughters of the Most Blessed Trinity, alias FST Sisters, is one of the few Roman Catholic Orders native to Ghana, West Africa. The FST Sisters was founded in 1984 by Rt. Rev. Peter Sarpong, Bishop of the Kumasi Diocese, to improve the physical and spiritual quality of life for the poor in rural Ghanaian villages. FST, Filiae Sanctissimae Trinitatis, is the Latin translation for the Daughters of the Most Blessed Trinity. Their ministry is mainly in the Ashanti Region, Southern Ghana but they hope to spread to other parts of the country in future (see map below). Spiritually, they provide religious education and services for the villages they serve. Physically, they provide essential services to the poor, specifically in education and healthcare that would otherwise not available in rural areas. For example, while urban parishioners can attend daily mass as well as choose from two to four masses on Sunday, villagers see a priest once or twice a year and thus have mass only during those times. Due to the work of the FST Sisters, the villagers not only receive spiritual nourishment, but also basic healthcare and education.

The Sisters serve as teachers, nurses, psychologists, healthcare providers, midwives, catechists, seamstresses, etc. according to the needs of the people they work with (one can think of them as Peace Corp Volunteers or UNICEF Aid workers and missionaries). They aim to build schools and hospitals in the areas they serve. But, being a young order, they are greatly constrained financially and cannot train interested women to pursue their charism without your help.

Unlike other religious orders, the FST Sisters can wear two different habits. They have a regular one (i.e. Ghanaian style skirt and blouse) as worn by the nun on the front of the brochure and a Latin Rite (foreign) one, which is what the nuns are wearing in the picture at the back of the brochure. The Sisters can wear their veil in the Latin Rite or Ghanaian style.

Goal
The Sisters aim to build an educational facility in the centrally located village of Jamasi. This facility would house a much need elementary school in addition to a vocational institution. The elementary school would have 40 pupils in each grade, while the vocation school would have about 12 apprentices at a time. The vocational school would focus on sewing apprenticeships. To date, about $4,350 has been raised towards the estimated $90,000 project cost.

Update on the 2002 Campaign
Thanks to your incredible generosity, the FST Sisters were able to purchase two sewing machines, at a cost of $200 each plus the associated apprenticeship fees and placed two young women in a vocational tailoring school at their Jamasi convent. Jamasi is about an hour's drive from Kumasi (see map above). To date, the Sisters have placed 10 young laywomen in sewing apprenticeship in this convent and there's apparently a long list of hopeful applicants. To accommodate such a need the Sisters need to build a vocational center since the convent is not large enough to house all the young women.

As always, the Sisters are grateful for supporting their work and mission. You can make a tax-deductible donation to the FST Sisters via the Sisters of Loretto in Colorado as follows:

FACTOIDS

• Ghana has 5.3 million Catholics, about 29% of the total population of around 18 million

• It costs as little as $0.41 per dose to immunize a child against childhood common diseases as tuberculosis, measles, tetanus and whooping cough in Ghana