A few days ago a certain “bernadette” made a comment at the Bible Workshop asking me to help her with a problem.   She has been assigned by her community to prepare the eucharistic liturgy in Tagalog and she found herself ill-equipped for it.  So she asked whether it was possible for me to help her with Tagalog translations, especially for the prayers of the faithful.  In a subsequent email, she wrote:

We are here in Nicosia, Cyprus. the numbers of Filipino we have just here in Nicosia is around 2thousand unfortunately just few (500) of us are in the community, overall Cyprus about 10 thousand. We started 16 years ago, I was assign to do the transparencies for the readings in tagalog for the Filipino community mass, unfortunately I couldn’t make the prayer of the faithful in tagalog over 16 years cause I don’t have idea from where or which book I can take it, it’s just happened somebody told me regarding your web page, so I tried.

Cyprus is an island in the Mediterranean that is shaped like a hand with a finger pointing somewhere between Turkey and Syria. It is one of the Bible lands from the New Testament [see this page about Cyprus in the New Testament]. Click on the thumbnail to your left for a bigger picture.

I was glad to know that there are quite a number of Filipinos there who come together to hear the Mass in Tagalog there.  So what I did was to scan a Sambuhay Missalette for the 24^th Sunday into PDF and had it posted on the web for download.  Bernadette got it just a few days ago.  So this Sunday, I’ll be helping 500 Filipino nationals in Nicosia Cyprus hear Mass and pray for the Church in Tagalog.  Now I think that is one other reason why it is worth doing this web ministry.