Br Paul Noonan Formation Centre, Tamale: June 2011

Thursday, June 23, 2011

MINISTRY AT TAMALE CHILDREN'S HOME

(Left) What to wear today? (Right) Duelling bottles? Essential tasks to start the day.

Tamale Children’s home is one of the ministry places where the novices have been working as volunteers in previous years here in Ghana. This year two of us, Nature Joseph Busiku and Joseph Abass Kamara, are working there every Friday. The orphanage currently is looking after 28 children, 9 infants and 19 others who are of school age. The majority of the people working in the orphanage are females, including 13 mothers. They work in an organized way with three shifts, morning, afternoon and night. Many children kept at the home are brought from the hospitals or local families due to children being abandoned by their own mothers, because of poverty or because the parents have died.
The orphanage has a pre-school for these children, which is also open to the local community. The school has got no proper teaching materials, such as text-books, story books, teacher’s books, materials for games or writing boards for pupils. The teachers working in the school are finding it difficult to teach the children effectively due to this lack of resources. In the face of this, we novices have taken the initiative by providing some materials, such as bottle tops as counters which can be used by the children for counting in mathematics.

What we do at the Orphanage:
· Washing and dressing the children ready for school.
· Bottle feeding, cleaning and changing their dresses, and soothing them if they cry.
· Preparing their beds and helping in doing their laundry.
· Entertaining some of the children who are not in school.
· Helping to teach at the school.

A personal reflection - Nature Joseph Busiku
The reception which I was given on the very first day at the ministry was an impressive experience. I felt I was nourished and inspired in my spiritual growth and relationship with God by a spirit of keenness that I feel every time I am in the home relating with the kids.
Mostly I prepare the children for school, feed the babies, and entertain some kids who are not in school. When it comes to feeding the babies, it gives me a deeper sense of my own experience as a tot and the love and care I was given. As I start to bottle feed the tots and clean them if they have made a mess of the porridge or have urinated or messed themselves, I feel a special sense of connectedness with the kids. It’s during this time when these children experience the feeling of human touch and care which they miss from their biological parents. This challenge brings me happiness and joy in this ministry every Friday.
In the school on Fridays, the children have a few lessons but mostly entertainment activities. I teach them lessons such as counting, reading of the alphabet, drawing and coloring. For entertainment, I energize them with songs and different types of clapping, while outside they play football and other games.
I hope my heart will persist in reaching out with enthusiasm, courage and love towards all children I may encounter in my life.

A memorable experience - Joseph Abass Kamara
“Amaraaba!” This common greeting here means “Welcome”. I would like to share with you an amazing story from my ministry at the children’s home.
One Friday morning while we were busy dressing the children for school, a police officer arrived in a car from the Tamale Teaching Hospital. She had with her a baby girl. According to the officer, the baby had been abandoned shortly after delivery by the mother. When the baby started crying, the doctor and nurses at the hospital started asking for the mother. They asked around the entire ward but could not find the mother. Some of the patients nearby told the doctor that they saw the mother going outside almost an hour before the baby started crying. The lady in charge of the orphanage accepted the baby from the officer and asked us to give the baby a name. After giving her the name Josephine, we all welcomed her with a song.
We have been told recently by a family who visited the orphanage that Josephine will be adopted by them and will go to live with them overseas. May we all remember in our prayers Josephine and the many other abandoned children. We pray also for those working to care for such children in the world.

What do we want this novitiate to be?

There is a saying that goes something like this: “If we don’t do what we believe in, then we’ll end up believing in what we do”. Without a vision that is authentic and alive to guide our actions, then we can settle for rationalizing the status quo or what is convenient and comfortable.
One of the first things the new team in Tamale did was to spend time beginning to articulate its vision of a novitiate beyond the basics laid down in our Constitutions. Here are some elements of what we came up with:
Novitiate is a journey, a process that involves KNOWING, EXPERIENCING and CHOOSING.
It is an INITIATION into Christian Brother religious life, so a “rite of passage” into a new identity, a time of learning and testing.
Novitiate confronts the novices with the Brother’s vocation as a call to brotherly solidarity and community, not to privilege, status and security.
It involves exploration of the basic values of faith and vocation, and the challenge to embrace these out of personal conviction and free choice.
Novitiate means understanding that a religious vocation makes a claim on the whole of the person and his life, including his inner life, his relationships and his professional activity (ministry). Furthermore, it challenges the novice to see the dynamic inter-relationship of these areas and to learn what their integration means.
Novitiate is a time of DISCERNMENT. The novice learns more deeply who he is, and what this Christian Brother life is. There is a constant back-and-forth movement between these two poles as an answer is sought to the question, “Is this where I am meant to be? Is this the life that will enable me to find my true self in God?”