Letters to the editor - October 13, 2024

Thank you from Ethiopia

I would like to thank the Mission Fund of Malta for offering Galilee Centre, a retreat house in Debre Zeit, Ethiopia, three donations in the last few months.

They offered us €1,000 in May to build part of an 11.5 metres-long retaining wall. Then, in September, they offered us €3,000 as help to build the first-floor slab of five rooms, and another €1,000 intended for spiritual ministries. Moreover, early this month, Mission Fund gave us €10,000 for various needs of the ongoing building project in Galilee Centre that we started six years ago.

It is a blessing that we have a Maltese organisation that caters so generously to Maltese missionaries serving the Church in different parts of the world. Their constant support is making it possible for us to improve the prayer facilities of the centre and to continue with constructing two buildings – planned to have 20 rooms in all – to welcome more retreatants.

Continue to support us with your prayers and generosity, so that, in this house of prayer, people of goodwill meet God and find inner peace. You can also help us by sending to the Mission Fund office used stamps and donations.

Kindly send your donations online or by direct bank transfer to one of the following accounts:

BOV: IBAN No: MT70VALL220130000

000 16300798022; APS: IBAN No: MT67APSB77079005231820000 820762; BNF: IBAN No: MT94BNIF145020000

0000087963101; LOMBARD: IBAN No. MT65LBMA05000000000001440822115.

For more information about the Mission Fund, please access the website:  www.missionfund.org.mt.

I will continue to remember your families and your daily needs in my Eucharist.

FR JOSEPH PULLICINO SJ – Debre Zeit, Ethiopia

Rotten new schedule

PBS’s new programmes schedule of TVM is disappointing.

The fatidical new programmes schedule of TVM after their ‘summer break’ has already been receiving the brickbats of the neutral listening populace.

What is hindering the powers that be at PBS from showing much more creativity and awareness of the real essence of the public service obligation of this national station?

Is it because the people who make such decisions are not equipped with the necessary cultural attributes that are needed for then enhancing those of its listening public?

Is it because programme schedule creators do not have the financial and other wherewithals (including technical) to be able to stop feeding hay to the asinine hangers-on who will simply tell you that as long as “pop and advertising dough” keep riding the waves with “the will of the people”, then all is OK?

The best manifestation of this popular rant is the predominance of pop music/songs, blah-blah and hogwash programmes that feature with a large percentage of airtime on this station’s programmes. Freudian slip like manifestation of this inability of creating ever more intelligent programmes is the fact that certain programmes have been moved to places in the schedule which are more attractive: like the intelligent moves of Vi o Va, Seħer Ilsienna, or others.

Why is the same treatment not being given to classical music, opera, historical narrative, socio/political discussion, newspaper analysis, sports discussions, technology programmes, and the like? Where are PBS’s radio programmes on economic and financial analysis? Why have the BBC’s news been changed/removed from certain timings?

Above all, this being a public service radio, should there not be some form of external control or assessment of any new programme schedules being newly put into place before the public is simply obliged to bear, hear and suffer?

There is a lot which is simply rotting in that state of Denmark.

JOHN CONSIGLIO – Birkirkara