Three years ago a young priest decided something had to be done for the drug addicts, alcoholics and men coming out of prison with no welfare system to help them and no where to go.

He became acutely aware that many ended up taking their own lives. He tried everywhere in his city of Vilnius to open a house for these men but the people objected to him opening a house anywhere in their city. So finally he went out into a remote area miles from civilisation and took over some abandoned huts deep in the forest where these rejects of society would not be objected to.

Here he started to make a home for these homeless men giving them a roof over their head and begging for food where ever he could get it. A year ago we heard he was finding it hard to keep even this meagre existence going. So we went out there and saw these men and the priest who looked after them living in the most appaling conditions. Their to toilet was a bucket, and their water was taken from a rain water barrel filled with water that collected on their rusted corrugated roof. The man who alerted us to their plight and most concerned about this young priest and the conditions these men lived in, was His Eminence Cardinal Audrys Backis. It was he who brought us there to see if there was any way we could help them. After we saw the primitive housing with leaky roofs, no sanitation, no water, we decided this was another urgent project for our “Divine Mercy In Action” works of mercy.
The Cardinal celebrated a mass in one of the old huts and after the mass we announced that having seen the primitive conditions they lived in HUDT was prepared to get involved in their life and to build proper accommodation and a chapel for them and to help them with many of their problems to survive into the future. It was heart wrenching to see grown men both religious and lay with tears in their eyes when we made the announcement.
These men all want to be rehabilitated and they are all willingly being instructed in the faith by Fr.Valarius the priest who has given his life to these men. There is now a temporary Divine Mercy chapel made up with chipboard with an Image hung on the wall and their new belief in God has given them all a reason for living and their miseries of the past pale into insignificance when they contemplate a new life with God.

Unfortunately when Fr. Valarius tried to grow vegetables in the ground around he realised why no body wanted this land. The soil is extremely poor and after much experimentation they found the only crop it will take is herbs. So the men now work everyday growing herbs and although they have not yet got a market, we hope we can find a market for these herbs, so that it will help to sustain them to some degree.

This would also give the men some pride in knowing their labour is contributing to their own survival. The conditions here in winter of course are something else and the ground becomes a quagmire and as all the roads leading in and out of the forest are dirt roads and the access into or out of the forest is impassable.

It is a harsh place to live in winter and as you can imagine the health of some of these young men is very bad when they arrive here and this is one of the reasons we have to provide accommodation as soon as humanly possible