(Editor’s Note: Below is a message sent to us from His Eminence Francis Cardinal Arinze, concerning some good news from his home Archdiocese of Onitsha in Nigeria.
(This message reached us at the same time that Robert Cardinal Sarah’s latest book, Le soir approche et déjà le jour baisse [Evening is approaching and already the day is almost over], became available in French on Kindle. It will be available in English from Ignatius Press on September 1.
(In this book — the third in his trilogy – Cardinal Sarah explores the depths of the crisis of Christianity in the West, hoping to reawaken it and locating much of the problem in a weak and traitorous clergy.
(If the book doesn’t present good news as such, faithful Catholics will welcome its arrival on our troubled scene.)
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It may seem as if “no news” is “good news” since good news often does not make the newsstand, yet two Catholic schools in the Archdiocese of Onitsha in Nigeria proved otherwise by recently distinguishing themselves at different levels of secondary school (high school) competitions.
Six students of Regina Pacis Model Secondary School, Onitsha, emerged the overall winners in the last World Technovation Challenge Competition in the United States.
Technovation is an annual world competition for young girls between the ages of 10 and 18. It is an initiative that equips them with skills to solve real-world problems by means of technology, and helps them become tech entrepreneurs and leaders who can discern their community challenges and then create a mobile app solution to meet these challenges.
The students of Regina Pacis won the challenge with a mobile application called the FD-Detector which they developed to help tackle the challenge of fake pharmaceutical products in Nigeria and beyond. They also applied the robotics and coding insights in solving existential problem of fake drugs.
The school had earlier won the competition at the national level and then proceeded to the international level that brought together students from different parts of the world. Over 115 countries participated in the competition, but only 12 teams from all over the world were selected as finalists for the pitch in San Francisco.
Similarly, another group of four students from another Catholic school in the Onitsha Archdiocese, St. John’s Science and Technical College, Alor, won the bronze medal in the just concluded International Festival of Engineering, Sciences, and Technology (I-FEST) competition in Tunisia.
They clinched this position with their brainchild known as Toroidal transformer, which, according to them, was an improvement on other devices of electrical inverters and transformers already in the market. “I-FEST is a 9-day festival organized by ATAST, the Tunisian Association for the future of Science and Technology, open for all students and supervisors aged between 14-24, and even parents and professors.”
This is good news! It is an encouragement, if any was needed, of Catholic Church engagement in primary and secondary education in Nigeria.
(Sources: Chukwuebuka Onuabuchi and Ononye VC.)
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