Beauty

I got no more than 10 kilometers when a pothole popped my left trailer tire just outside a schoolhouse. As if I had stepped on a beehive, the kids came swarming out to greet me, clustering around me in a dense ring and touching and prodding and shoving to get a view. Teachers appeared, order was restored, I fixed my third flat of the day, I took a school portrait to send them when I get back, and then I got back on the road. I was tired, and it wasn't noon.

School Portrait

I got to N’Dali feeling rather unwell, asked for an auberge and was led off into the woods by a taxi-moto to the Centre d’Accueil et de Formation Gusunon Keru, created by the Catholic Diocese de N’Dali. It turns out that here in the forest at N’Dali is a national center offering a 20,000 volume library, a computer center, internet access, conference facilities, housing and secretarial services.

Notre Dame de N'Dali

A room was available for not very much, they made me a stupendous dinner of salad, rice, chicken and papaya, and they opened up the TV room so I could catch up on Benin news. I told myself I wouldn’t eat chicken on this trip, but then I told myself lots of things. A slightly deformed young man who didn’t say a word snuck in to sit next to me and I Split the dinner with him.

Notre Dame de N'Dali

I sat in on the evening service, held at dusk in a small gated garden in front of a large display of Notre Dame de N’Dali. Multicolored lighting made a flamboyant spectacle at her feet, dimming the swirl of orchids above. Perhaps 25 people sat on benches on three sides of the perimeter, young sisters dressed in brown robes, a pastor in more ornate regalia, a brother and lots of kids. I heard birds and motorcycles and people outside the walls. The sisters started singing, a call and response in the clearest and most beautiful voices, something simple and exquisite in this wild place, fragile but resolute to the masculine harangue from the loudspeakers at the mosque in the village. I was exhausted from the day, I was not myself, I was reduced to quiet tears. I do not believe they knew the beauty of their effort, but I know I have never witnessed a more beautiful mass.

Catholic center

Ndali, Benin