Six clergy for 134 parishes.
Bishop Osios, two priests, and three deacons drive the highland roads and the coastal plain every week so that villages can baptize their children, receive communion, and confess. Most parishes see a priest once a month.
The plan is twenty priests and twenty deacons, one for each regional parish. A sponsor covers a deacon at $550 a month or a priest at $750 a month, for up to five years while the parishes grow into supporting their own clergy.
Bishop Osios
Evangelos Pata Tuctuc was consecrated Bishop of Sasima in October 2024 at the seminary above Huehuetenango, the first Guatemalan-born Orthodox bishop and a spiritual son of Fr. Andrés Girón. [Christos: add anything he’d want said here.]
The priests and deacons
[Names and a line about each of the two priests and three deacons, with a photo if you have one.]
Come and see
The diocese needs more than money. Chanters who can teach Byzantine chant to a new choir. Catechists who can spend a week with a parish that has never been taught the Orthodox faith. Pilgrims who want to see forty people baptized on a Sunday morning. If you can go, there is a place for you.
A pilgrim's account
[Christos’s first-person account of the visit goes here. Keep his voice. The lines from the letter to use: the parishioners waiting to greet the bishop, women with babies on their backs, the baptisms at each stop, the meal after every service, and “they have nothing, and they need everything.”]