Viridiane’s Hope for Children

Mission Cooperative Appeal

Viridiane’s Hope for Children’s Health and Education (VHCHE) is a Virginia 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and a Catholic Charity of the Arlington Diocese.

Established in 2019 in Springfield, Virginia, its mission is to improve the lives of children in underserved and underprivileged communities locally and globally. VHCHE’s mission of bringing joy to other children was born out of sorrow, and the help VHCHE is providing to children in need was built out of desperation; it was founded by grieving parents to celebrate and remember their daughter through health and education programs that support its mission.

VHCHE’s current geographic focus is rural and very poor areas in Cameroon, Central West Africa. It is a country with wide areas of poverty. Family life in some of these areas is dramatically compounded by large numbers of internal refugees fleeing ongoing armed domestic unrest in the Northwest and Southwest Regions of the country. In these areas, young people suffer the most and VHCHE is currently working there the hardest.

Since 2021, VHCHE has completed a wide variety of projects in several impoverished villages in five dioceses of Cameroon. Examples include the construction of a new building at a Catholic school; the drilling of six drinking water wells powered by electricity along with a 1,000 to 3,000-gal reserved tank; the construction of four toilets; a major renovation of a Catholic school, a chapel, and a presbytery; the construction of multi-student workstations (bench/desk sets); the funding for the purchase of instructional materials for teachers and scholarships for students. The cost of each drinking water well project including the tower is between $10K and $16K, depending on hydrogeological conditions and the specifications of the associated tower.

Mission appeal donations will be used towards our project to build an English speaking 1-6 grade school with a clinic and computer literacy center in the diocese of Nkongsamba, at Saint Anne Catholic School in New Melong to help many English-speaking families who are fleeing the war and have no local infrastructure to accommodate their learning curriculum in English. We also plan to build a pastoral care center in the Archdiocese of Bamenda for victims of violence in the war, and drill additional drinking water wells in other villages of rural Cameroon so that children and families may have water to drink. 

For more information about the work of VHCHE in Cameroon, visit www.vhche.org.