St Peter’s Hammersmith is linked with St Bartholomew’s Cathedral in Messumba

Our parish of St Peter’s in Hammersmith has been linked since the early days of ALMA with the parish of St Bartholomew’s in Messumba, the cathedral church for the diocese of Niassa.

We pray for one another at our services and exchange greetings at major festivals. A member of our congregation visited Messumba for Bishop Mark’s enthronement in 2003. Bishop Mark visited us in 2005. In 2006 Father Mauricio Msossa, the priest in charge at Messumba, was our guest in Hammersmith together with his sister Monica, who chairs the Mothers’ Union on the Lakeshore. In April 2008 a younger member of our congregation, Jess Curnock Cook, stayed with the van Koeverings to help with parish work and visited Messumba to hand over vital school equipment donated by our own children.

We have worked with St Andrews, Sudbury for some years to help put Messumba’s parish school back on its feet. Government school provision is meagre. The aim is to help Messumba’s congregation to re-build the secondary and boarding house facilities to add to the existing primary school, with a long-term aim of re-instating the renowned teacher training college that served Mozambique so well until destroyed by pre-independence violence in the 1960s.