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Far Beyond Papiri in the Interior
The Priest’s Story
There is nothing nice about being a missionary.
It is constant effort, eighteen hours a day every day, living always outside your comfort zone, sleeping in the claustrophobic cavern of the mosquito-net bed, no electric and, worst of all, the feeling of facing, on a daily basis, the enormity of the human challenge of sickness and need. I am with Donall as we travel to Papiri and beyond. We are further to the north and west than any two Europeans have ever been before.
The temperature is in the mid forties, the sand is everywhere, but there is the hint of the wet season somewhere in the air. The people are praying for rain.
We arrive at the village that is nothing more that a clachan of mud huts with straw roofs. There is a wooden fence surrounding.
The “church” made of mud and straw with corrugated zinc roof and earthen floor stands slightly to the one side. It is forty feet long, eighteen feet wide, and cost 200 euro to build. The people did the work themselves and their church is their place of prayer, a meeting house, a gathering place for talking and planning, a centre for this Kamberi community.
The people pour out to meet us. Children come laughing and dancing.
“Fada…Fada,” they cry out in welcome for Donall is back with them, he is their only hope and they know it. There has been planting already in expectation of the wet season. There has been growth, six inches of green here and there above the rough sandy earth. It is the crucial time and if the rains do not come all will die and the process will be started all over again.
Donall is meeting with ten Catechists. They have come in from other remote places. These are the men who carry the work forward in the absence of the Father.
Donall is one priest among a hundred thousand Kamberi people. The Catechists are the drivers of progress on the ground, they are “off the people” and the people call them what they are, their own. An old woman of about thirty five, yes thirty five, is brought to the gathering in the little Chapel. Her breasts are shells of emaciated and atrophied skin. Her head is tiny, face deeply furrowed, sight has gone from her eyes, a grave consequence of simple measles. Her eyeballs have become white and bloodied. This lady of Africa has asthma, and maybe, Donall fears, TB as well. But he reasons, “she is living too long for that.” Conversations occur. Instructions are given to the Catchiest. The woman will be taken in a week’s time to Shafaci to be treated by Sister Queen OLA at her next clinic. In the meantime Donall places his hands on the head and right shoulder of this dear lady and prays. Then she is taken back to her mud hut home to lie in her sickness and her darkness.
The meeting and the planning goes on. It is a work of Christian outreach to humanity.
“You couldn’t do it unless Jesus was here with you,” says Donall, “and he is, right here with us.”
Cometh the Hour
Cometh the Man
The dust bowl of the Sub-Sahara Africa at Papiri sees the beginning of the heat of the new day. Fr. Donall is with his people for Mass; goats and bony cattle wander listlessly among the village huts. Flies are already on the wing and men are bringing the cattle to the ground to clean the festering wounds created by the larvae the African bluebottle that have taken up residence on and in the beasts.
The dawn chorus is a symphony of the call of the goats and cattle, the “Kyries” and “Alleluias” of the prayers in native Kamberi from the palm-tree chapel, and the sweet notes of the birdlife in the modest canopy surrounding.
Smoke rises from the still-smouldering embers of open village fires of the night before and with the “go in peace to love and serve the Lord” from the mass ending, the people emerge with Fr. Donall to set about their task of the day.
Time moves towards the start of the wet season in June and in the matter of school-building in Africa, time is of the essence.
The SMA father organises and supervises, goes to the city of Ilorin a full day’s drive away to buy the building materials, the people themselves, the parents of the children to be educated, help with the lifting and the digging and learn new skills in the doing.
Donall O’Cathain, is a priest with the SMA order and he has been ministering to the Kamberi People of north west Nigeria for then past seventeen years. Donall is young, just 44; he’s energetic and enthusiastic and has a demeanour and build that would well-suit him to turning out in a Cork jersey on a hurling final day in Croke Park. He is a proud son of that city.
He needs that toughness in Africa where he is at the heart of his Kamberi community, alone Cork man among quarter of a million African people.
“These are a semi-nomadic people and they have rarely had education. That has always kept them down and for generations they have been the underdogs.
The story in Africa is that education sets you free,” said Donall.
Three years ago things began to change for the Kamberi and Fr. Donall was to be at the heart of that change.
The Kamberi people themselves realised they wanted education and put it on the agenda.
Matthew, a leader of the community, speaks of their hopes.
“We have never had what other neighbours have had. Education allows them to do well, to get better ways of farming, and to help build up resources for the bad times. It is not so very much for us to hope for and we know that our friend Father Donall will make it happen.”
That approach by Matthew, on behalf of his people, kicked-started Fr. Donall into action and today St. Mary’s Primary School is complete. A new era has begun for the Kamberi people and the link with the Cork man and with those who fund his work from the comfort of Ireland are at the very heart of it all.
“We do it for Africa and the people. They are so open and kind, so loving and so committed to their values of family and Christian love. God is everywhere in the life of Africa. They don’t have to prove the existence of God, He is there among them, always has been it would seem, and they speak to Him in all the things they do in the course of their normal lives.”
Courage is a word that comes to mind when considering the work of the priests in Africa but for them it’s not courage at all.
They walk in the shadow of the God of their great believing and confidence and optimism is the result. Their God, their great faith, enables them to do their business and walk easily among the African people.
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