Int'l Women's Day: Celebrating women in the Church

(Vatican Radio) Sister Azezet Kidane is one of the female voices taking part in a special event in the Vatican to celebrate International Women’s Day on Saturday March 8th.

The gathering entitled “Voices of Faith” is focusing on the work of Women in the Church and is being held at the San Carlo Cinema inside the Vatican.

Sister Kidane is a Comboni Missionary who for the last four years has been helping victims of violence and human trafficking. Many have fled to Israel from countries such as Eritrea and Sudan.

The Eritrean nun who was the recipient of the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons Heroes Award for 2012, was also one of the key speakers at a conference held at Vatican Radio on Thursday on the theme “From Eritrea to Europe, news from a humanitarian emergency”.

Since 2009 traffickers in the Sinai have held captive refugees and asylum seekers en route to Israel often subjecting them to severe abuse and torture and demanding ransoms of up to 40 thousand dollars per person for their release.

“… we were receiving people really in a very bad condition and people who were traumatized and shocked with burns with wounds…” says Sr Azezet.

She goes on to say that the people she encountered were also suffering the psychological effects of their ordeal because “most of them were kidnapped and tortured in Sinai for so many months and they pay big ransoms of money…”

Sr Kidane also highlights the fact that although many of the people including the women have been through much suffering, they can still see the light at the end of the tunnel, they still have hope.

“This is what amazes me and gives me strength and their faith gives me, it challenges my faith but at the same time it gives me also the strength to believe again to trust, because for them they were mistreated by the human person so my work was again to give them the trust of the human person because only in that way they can carry on their lives.”

The 2:00-7:00 pm (UTC +1) “story-telling event” is being aired in live streaming on Saturday.
You can watch it on: www.voicesoffaith.org.

Listen to Lydia O’Kane’s interview with Sr Azezet Kidane: