Wonder Woman from Manitoba

We first noticed her at Alena, our Lebanese corner store a short walk from our apartment. For obvious reasons, we notice white people right away since we’re here. We seem to gravitate towards them like kids gravitate towards anyone in a Santa Claus suit at a shopping mall. She looked familiar at the store, but then all non-black folk look familiar to us these days. She was in front of us at the checkout…spoke French, detected a slight accent, so we knew she was not French like most white expats here. She was very polite to the three guys putting her groceries in the plastic bags…so she definitely could not be French. She had broken a bottle of Fanta in aisle 4 and, although the guy at the till told her to forget about it, she insisted paying for it. That did it, we both knew that she had to be Canadian.

I said Bonjour to her, she replied bonjour to Madeleine and I and quietly exited the store. I guess she wasn’t as excited about meeting white folks as we were…so she must have been here for a while. I mentioned to Madeleine that I had the impression that I had seen this lady somewhere before…

On our walk home, we noticed her again, putting her groceries in the back of a white pick-up truck. We stopped, and without thinking, I blurted out, Excuse me, but I have the impression I’ve already seen you somewhere before” (I know, smooth and slick like usual, the old Lemoine charm...just like the good old days when original pick-up lines like that one would bring the ladies swooning at my feet…what can I say?)

Could be, she said, who are you? Madeleine and I introduced ourselves and she introduced herself as Colette. Was this the Colette I have been trying to get hold of for the past 4 weeks? Was this the Colette that Judith, the British Ambassador’s wife had talked to us about last month? Was this the Colette I had met last May on my whirlwind week long tour of Conakry when I visited the orphanage with the school? Was this the Colette that supposedly came from Manitoba…and perhaps even from St-Pierre Jolys? Sure was! What a coincidence! Madeleine and I were noticeably and therefore embarrassingly excited by this chance encounter with the one and only Colette from Manitoba…possibly St-Pierre Jolys…and we let her know it. Not cool. In any case, she was already late for something, and had to leave, so I invited her to the school on Monday to talk about how we could get involved in the orphanage. She readily accepted, we had a date.

Well, turns out Colette is Canadian, not from St-Pierre Jolys, but originally from Thomson, Manitoba. She has been in Africa for the past 12 years, and in Guinea for the past 5 years. She’s in radio, and came to Africa to set up community radio stations in places that could not even begin to think about getting such a thing.

We spent just over 2 hours speaking with Colette on that Monday afternoon. What a story! During her time in Africa, she initiated and has been involved in various humanitarian projects, most of them involving either women or children. Kept thinking in my mind...now there is someone who is doing something with her life!

Two years ago, Colette opened up a community radio station in Conakry. Soon after hitting the air waves, she and the station started getting occasional calls from women pleading for help because they could not afford raising their children, and openly offering their children to anyone who could take her or him up for adoption. The radio station had rented two floors of a building and a few rooms on one of the floors were not being used. Colette decided to open up these vacant rooms for the purpose of receiving some of these women and their children as a temporary shelter until another home could be found for the children.

Well…word got around and before you knew it, the shelter quickly filled up with abandoned babies. Today, the centre, known a Centre Espoir de Vie, has 9 children living there, waiting for placement with a family that could accommodate another child.

The centre is not an orphanage, but a Children Rescue Centre. Some of these kids were abandoned in a park or at a market, and were brought to the Centre. All new arrivals are immediately registered with the neighbouring gendarmerie, brought to the hospital for a thorough medical assessment, and then to a crib at the centre. They are given names when they arrive. A staff of 6 ladies work at the centre. Donations from various groups (mostly from Canada) are the only source of revenue that enables the centre to operate.

We invited Colette to come back to the school later in the week to speak to our students about the centre, in preparation for eventual weekly visits to the Centre in the context of a community service program that Madeleine is putting together. These 'orphans' need to be held, cuddled, loved, and our students are good at doing that. Colette spoke to our kids for an hour. Understandably, we could have heard a pin drop.

One particularly touching story was about Nathaniel. Nathaniel arrived at the centre last year as a 5 day old baby. He had been found in a plastic bag, on the railroad tracks, by a group of teenage boys, not far from the centre. They had noticed something moving on the tracks, found the bag, opened it, and there was Nathaniel, crying. The mother had left him there, on the tracks. Desperation. Doesn’t make any sense, never will. But then, I guess desperation never does make sense.