St Mary’s Parish – Kabwe: The project of building a new church which started at St Mary’s Parish in Kabwe started back in 2003. Ever since there have been many difficulties that came along the way.
Today after many struggles the steel structure of the new church stands erect for the joy of the parishioners and hope for a new place of worship in Kabwe.
Stages
The building of the new church in St Mary’s Parish (Kabwe) has gone through many stages of development which are not yet completed.
However, three stages can be singled out as it developed thourhg the years.
First stage:
The project of constructing a new church at St Mary’s Parish in Kabwe first started with Fr Joseph Ojczjech who clearly saw that the church was becoming too small for the Sunday celebrations despite the three masses that were conducted there.
Fr Joseph then started dreaming of making a church a bit bigger that the actual church which was originally the chapel for St Mary’s school. However, his project was still too small for the actual realisation of the project. Consequently, a bigger church was designed to be built for the 25 anniversary of the Salesian presence in Zambia.
The plans were approved and thus the new church was no longer a dream but a project that started making itself a reality.
Fr Joseph started travelling abroad and fundraising money for the construction of the new church. The parishioners availed themselves for the works of construction in order to lower the costs. They dug the foundations and cast the concret under the supervision of the constructor Mr. Dino.
In the meantime the steel structure was being built in Lusaka (139km away from Kabwe) by Saxon Steel that gave a reasonable quotation for the same.
In this first stage many mistakes were made due to the rush in making the project become reality. One of them was the foundation. The reading of the plans was done badly and later on the foundations were to be chipped and corrected by Engeneers from Kitwe in order to go ahead with the construction. Fr Joseph died in 2004 soon after the foundations were completed. Fr Andrew Reut took over the construction of the new church.
Second Stage:
Once the foundations were corrected the steel structure was brought to the site all the way from Lusaka, some of the beams were to be cut because they were longer than the longest available truck.
The erection of the steel structure constitutes the second stage and it is still ongoing. The different pieces of metal are being put together and lifted to its final place in order to make the structure solid and ready to support the roof. The roof will be raised 24 mt from the floor.
The second stage will take another couple of months to be completed because the work goes slowly, correcting previous mistakes due to a wrong reading of the drawings. The roofing will be done sometime at the end of December.
Third Stage:
This is likely to be the most complicated stage because for the first two stages some money was raised in some appeals done abroad. The third stage will be fruit of the efforts of the local community to build the walls, slab, toilets, and offices for the new church. The total amount needed reaches the USD 350,000. However, efforts are made in order to find some generous donors in the USA and Germany.
