Pedro Opeka

Pedro Opeka was born in 1948 in San Martín, on the edge of Buenos Aires, to Slovenian parents who had fled Yugoslavia after the Second World War. His father was a bricklayer, and from the age of nine Pedro worked beside him, learning to lay bricks, mix mortar and finish a wall, a skill that has turned out to matter more than anything he learned at seminary.

He joined the Vincentians at seventeen, went to Madagascar as a student in 1970, and after ordination in 1975 spent thirteen years as a parish priest in Vangaindrano in the south-east, among rice farmers. In 1989 he was sent to Antananarivo to run a seminary, and on his first walks around the capital came upon the Andralanitra rubbish dump, where several thousand people, many of them children, lived by scavenging in the refuse and slept in it.

He did not open a soup kitchen. He told them that if they were willing to work he would help them build homes. With the first families he set up a granite quarry beside the dump and a brickworks, and the men cut stone and the women sold it. The houses came row by row, then schools, a clinic, a cemetery and a stadium. The settlement, called Akamasoa, meaning good friends, has grown into a cluster of villages housing around twenty-five thousand people, with several hundred thousand more helped over the years.

Pope Francis visited in 2019. Opeka, now in his seventies, still lives there.