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IVORY COAST: Bishop's evangelisation plans are thinking outside the b-ox!
By John Pontifex
An ox with young people benefiting from an income generation scheme devised by Bishop Antoine Koné
Aid to the Church in Need is lending support to a bishop’s unusual initiative to attract young Africans to the Church – with help from a little-known musical instrument and some oxen.
When Bishop Antoine Koné in the Ivory Coast was given a 150-acre plot of land, he saw it as a golden opportunity for evangelisation – especially among the young – in a vast diocese numbering only 2,500 Catholics.
The youthful bishop already knew he had struck a chord with young people when he began playing liturgical music on the balaphone. The musical instrument is similar to the xylophone and typical of this region of west Africa.
Speaking to staff from Aid to the Church in Need, he said that at his church in Odienné, in north-west Ivory Coast, he was teaching young people the balaphone. Mass attendance had shot up from barely a handful to nearly 700.
Now Bishop Koné wishes to capitalise on the success of his evangelisation initiatives by creating job opportunities for disaffected youth. Many struggle to find a future in a region of high unemployment and worsening poverty.
Making use of the large site he was given, the bishop has plans for the young people to help develop a coconut plantation and he wants to buy oxen to help till the land.
Bishop Koné has turned to Aid to the Church in Need to help fund the scheme.
The bishop’s plans were outlined to Aid to the Church in Need project coordinators during the charity’s first-ever trip to Ivory Coast last month.
They were assessing the pastoral needs of a country where Catholics are 25 percent of a total population of 20 million.
Returning from the ground-breaking trip, Africa projects coordinator Christine du Coudray Wiehe said: “I very much appreciated the enormous needs of the diocese in an area of primary evangelisation.
“It is excellent that the young people are able to develop their faith and learn to play the balaphone.
“Clearly Aid to the Church in Need can’t help with everything but we have to do more because so many people have no job – especially the youth. When young people leave school, the big question is ‘what will they do?’
“Aid to the Church in Need is not a charity which supports projects providing jobs for lay people except in very extreme circumstances, as is the case here.”
She underlined the country’s severe economic and social decline since 2000, when violence erupted leaving the country divided between rebel areas in the north and the government-controlled south.
Miss du Coudray Wiehe said: “I discovered a Church that is suffering a deep sense of abandonment, a kind of frustration borne of isolation from the outside world.
“The bishops and the faithful face an emergency situation and they don’t know where to turn.”
During the Aid to the Church in Need trip to nine of the country’s 15 dioceses, bishops underlined the need for catechetical programmes.
Plans are underway for support from the Uganda-based Youth Alive movement, providing help with pro-life schemes, especially Aids prevention, youth clubs and initiatives aimed at tackling drugs, alcohol abuse and prostitution.
Aid to the Church in Need is also committed to helping the country’s seminarians. They are based in buildings described by Miss du Coudray Wiehe as “deeply impoverished with very little repair work completed over many years”.
She said the students lacked essential library books and suffered from a shortage of clean water and electricity, and poor sleeping quarters.
As well as providing Mass stipends to seminary staff, the charity is committed to supporting the ongoing training of lecturers and other formators.
Assessing the priority needs of the country, Aid to the Church in Need will decide the details of a grant for the coconut plantation project within a few weeks.