HISTORY
Finding their place in a port city
 The first Good Shepherd
Sisters actually arrived in Cagayan de Oro a couple of years before the
foundation. The date was June 24, 1987,
and Srs. Mary Christina Sevilla and Mary Henedina Mananzan, who were then attached
to the Sapad Community, had traveled to the city at the invitation of then
Cagayan de Oro Archbishop Patrick Cronin, to look into the feasibility of
starting a community there.
A field study of the
locality had shown that as a port city and a vibrant educational center,
Cagayan de Oro was fast becoming a magnet for many young girls and women lured
or forced into prostitution. To respond
to this problem of sexual and economic exploitation of women, rooted in
poverty, the Sisters started a ministry to women. This was concretized with the
establishment of the Good Shepherd Counseling Center, located then at the
basement of the St. Augustine Multipurpose Formation Building. The Center was blessed by Archbishop Cronin
on the feast of Bl. Maria Droste on October 20, 1987.
During the first years of
the foundation, the Sisters conducted their ministry by going to the Social
Hygiene Clinic of the City Health Department, where they would try to reach out
to the young girls and women working in nightclubs, bars, karaoke joints and
massage parlors.
In time the Good Shepherd
Center became not only a counseling office but also a venue for socio-economic
projects aimed at minimizing and/or preventing the exploitation of vulnerable
girls and women. The Center, moreover, also offered its counseling services to
anyone, not just women and girls, who came seeking for help. And there were
indeed quite a number of them, from different strata of life. And among the counselees who came to the
Center, couples in crisis were notably significant in number.
Campus ministry at the
Liceo de Cagayan was also started together with seminarians from John Vianney
Theological Seminary and with Sisters from several religious congregations of
women.
One of the earliest shifts
in the ministry in Cagayan de Oro was the move to provide livelihood projects
so that women and girls who wanted to pursue tertiary education could be able
to pay for their tuition.
Income-generating projects were established for female students and
out-of-school youths who finished vocational courses but could not land any job
and who came from very poor districts in the city.
The income generating
projects included weed card-making, soap-making, baking of cookies and
sugar-coated peanuts production.
In 2007, the Cagayan de
Oro Community created an outreach program for prostituted women in partnership
with the organized Prostituted Women, Tingog sa Kasanay (TISAKA) of the city.
This program provides the women with a series of services in
education/formation, small scale socio-economic development (micro-finance),
psycho-emotional and spiritual development.
(Excerpts : Cagayan de Oro
Community: Finding their place in a port city,
100 Years in the Philippines: Religious
of the Good Shepherd.)
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