Saturday, February 11, 2012

COMMUNITY PASTORAL PLACEMENT

We novices are currently doing a very important part of our novitiate experience – the Community Pastoral Placement (or CPP). This is a chance for us to practise in a much more realistic way the life of the Christian Brothers. We are living for three months in two communities in Tamale, away from the novitiate and managing our community life, attending to our daily chores and working full-time in our various ministries. The CPP began in early January and concludes at the end of March.

GURUGU COMMUNITY

One community is at Choggu and the other at Gurugu. Each community has a Community Coordinator and a Bursar, and these positions rotate after every month, so that all of us have the opportunity to be in a leadership role in the community.

At Gurugu there are six of us - Belamino Muunga, Blaise Semoso, Christian Hazeley, Nature Busiku, Romano Rambu and Septimus Sama. Gurugu is a suburb of Tamale about 2 kilometers south of Tamale town centre. We were all anxious about what awaited us in our new setting, considering it was a new experience to all of us as non-Ghanaians, away from the familiar grounds of the novitiate house. Nevertheless, we have now acclimatized in the new place.



We are grateful to be living, working, praying and interacting with each other as we form a community and interact daily with the wider community around us. We are trying to express our commitment and be inspired by the spirit of Edmund and Jesus to live as a Gospel community. We admire the way that each of us has settled in to the new environment with his diverse experiences, uniqueness and gifts. There has been a good brotherly spirit over the first four weeks as we have adapted to our daily routines. The experiences encountered in our community are dealt with responsibly. We believe our experience so far reflects the quality of the novitiate programme over the last eleven months together, as well as the giftedness of each novice. We look forward to the gifts and challenges of the remaining two months.