PARISH FAMILY LUNCH 2007

BINJU-NKAMBE PARISH FAMILY LUNCH 2007-01-08
By Afor Maurice

Binju-Nkambe Parish celebrated their 4th Parish Family Lunch on Epiphany Sunday, 07 January 2007. The celebration began with Holy Mass at 8.00 a.m. with the Parish Priest, Father Robert Tanto as celebrant. Father Remi went to celebrate an earlier Mass in Kungi at 7 a.m. At the Binju Mass there were also a few people from Bakinchini and Akweto.
After the Binju Mass, families went to the former Parish Church which now serves as Parish Hall.

They brought to the Hall the different dishes which they had prepared for the lunch. Some of the men brought palm wine, sha and beer. Present also for the occasion was Miss Christina Peterek from Frankfurt, Germany. She came with the delegation that came out for the wedding of Ephriam and Makelia. She had stayed behind when the other members of the delegation returned to Kumbo last Saturday. We were very happy that she stayed to celebrate this day with us.

We also remembered very specially the people of St Joseph’s Parish, Gerrards Cross, England, and those of St Peter’s Parish Low Fell, England who had been with us at the celebration of the first ever parish lunch on January 4th 2004. We thought about all our partners in Germany and England, and members of our parish who had moved to other parishes in Cameroon. We had received goodwill messages from the families of Mr & Mrs Kwei (Tobin), Mr & Mrs Echu (Bamenda), Mr & Mrs Naseri (Bertoua), and Mr & Mrs Sama (Bamenda). These families had been part of our celebrations in the past and still remembered us in their prayers. We were united with all of them during our celebration. During the Mass Father Tanto had extended to the congregation greetings and special regards from Cecilia, Patricia, Frances Martin, and Mary Hughes, all of Low Fell, England. He had told us that at St Peter’s Church, Low Fell, the congregation would be praying for us and we would be united spiritually with them. Unfortunately a prayer testimony from Low Fell which had been made by those who had visited us from there last April did come in the email that morning. But we had been informed about that and were excited.

In the Hall were about sixty mothers with dishes they had prepared in Binju and Kungi for the occasion. Some people did not bring food or drink, but there was more than enough for the nearly 150 people present for the lunch. Six families introduced their food and how they had worked as a family to have the food ready for us at table. The variety was rich: rice and stew, cabbage and yams, corn foofoo and njamanjama, achu and catanga, plantains and ndole, etc. etc.
Mr Martin Mbunkur, who was MC for the occasion had carried from the farm to the house, the cocoyams which his wife had used to prepare the achu which the parish priest ate with relish. Mr Visha Vitalis chaired the occasion in the absence of the chairman of the Parish Pastoral Council.
After the introduction of the officials for the occasion, the Chairman welcomed all and said though we were far away from our partners in Germany and England, we were very close together. He reminded us that the world was a global village. Father Tanto said that as father of the parish family, he had noticed that our children in the parish were sick. He referred to a news item in the internet in which a 10 year old boy in Houston, USA, had hanged himself and died, imitating the hanging of Saddam Hussein which he saw on television. He concluded that he had tried to caution our parish children about the TV Programmes and the Videos they were watching and some of them had run away from parish programmes. He said at the beginning of this New Year he had prepared a questionnaire to be answered by the youths who still wanted to follow the formation the parish was offering them. He prayed that God would bless all who had sacrificed time and money to make this lunch such a successful come-together.