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Last year, Father Frank Colacicco visited with a group of children living in an orphanage he was helping in Nicaragua. He died there on Feb. 15.
February
20, 2006 
VOL.
44, NO. 4Oakland,
CA
Priest who
rallied parish to help
abandoned kids
dies in Nicaragua
“Imagine
that you are a child and your parents die or abandon you or that you are
a victim of abuse and had to leave your home to find refuge in the streets.”
Father Frank Colacicco of St. Isidore Parish in Danville wrote these words
in a newsletter about his program, Father Frank’s Kids, a non-profit
organization for young orphans in Latin America. This, he was saying,
is the reality that thousands of children around the world experience.
He died Feb. 15 while attending to some of those abandoned children in
Nicaragua.
Father Colacicco created Father Frank’s Kids nine years ago, in
order to provide funds for another organization -- Nuestros Pequeños
Hermanos (Our Little Brothers and Sisters).
NPH began in Mexico in 1954. As the story goes, a young American priest,
Father William Wasson, intervened in the case of an orphan boy who had
been arrested for stealing from the poor box in a Cuernavaca parish.
When the youth was taken to court, Father Wasson asked the judge to release
the boy to him. The judge complied, and one week later the authorities
sent him eight more homeless youngsters.
By the end of that year, the priest had 32 children, and thus Nuestros
Pequeños Hermanos was born, a charitable organization that serves
orphaned and abandoned children in Latin America and the Caribbean. It
now runs homes in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala,
Haiti, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua and Peru.
Its mission is to provide shelter, food, clothing, medical attention and
education to young people within a familial, Christian environment based
on principles of acceptance and unconditional love, work and responsibility.
Father Colacicco solicited funds for the group from the community of St.
Isidore during the eight years he served there.
Parishioner Dick Sanders, who helped the priest with Father Frank’s
Kids, said, “Between September 2004 and September 2005, we gave
NPH $48,000 worth of clothes, medicine and other articles - including
air conditioning equipment, sewing machines, coffee makers, washing machines
and dryers - for orphanages in Nicaragua, Guatemala and Honduras.”
More than 14,000 children have grown up in the NPH family since the organization
was created over 50 years ago. Most of them have graduated from high school,
and many have completed higher education. At present, about 3,000 in the
nine NPH countries are being cared for in a loving, secure environment.
The program is supported by up to $15 million a year in donations, with
60 percent of the funds coming from Europe. The rest is from Canada, the
U.S. and Latin America.
But St. Isidore parishioners contributed more than money. A number of
families have traveled to some of the countries where NPH operates, especially
to Nicaragua, to do volunteer work.
Father Colacicco was in this Central American country for more than two
months at the end of last year, attending to the physical and spiritual
needs of the young ones. “There are many children who need to receive
love and to know Jesus,” the priest told parishioners upon his return.
Ordained in 1979 for the Diocese of San Angelo, Texas, Father Colacicco
retired to Danville. Funeral arrangements were pending as The Voice went
to press. And the future of Father Frank’s Kids was uncertain. Information
about NPH is available at www.nphamigos.org.
