St Peter’s Parish, Bobi is a rural parish located in the diocese of Kontagora, Niger State. The common language spoken here is Hausa. Farming and animal husbandry is the principal activity of our people. We have over 35 outstation churches with a population of 2,500. The parish has been in existence since 2001 and it has lots of prospects for expansion and growth.
One of our basic pastoral activities is to reach out to the people in the villages and bring the Gospel to the most abandoned people in the area. Other pastoral activities include the teaching of catechism, formation of catechists and service leaders popularly known as mai wa’azi, home visitation, caring for the sick and elderly, formation of new groups in the church like CWO, CMO, Alter Servers, Choir and Cyon. We don’t have such groups yet in our parish this is to tell you the parish is still at the stage of primary evangelisation.
The people living around these areas are hospitable and welcoming despite lacking essential social amenities like good roads, health care systems, electricity supply, and communication network coverage. We try to render some of these services to our people when we encounter them. For example, due to the high level of illiteracy, we initiated the idea of starting a nursery and primary school because over 96% of our children are out-of-school children. We began by offering them free extra moral lessons under the mango tree last year in the parish compound and gradually moved them to our old classrooms. As their number kept growing we thought it wise to set up a school. So, we began the school with about 10 pupils with one teacher and gradually it is growing, and we have about 40 pupils with two qualified teachers. However, we are facing financial challenges as most parents cannot afford to pay the school fees of their children making it difficult to pay some of their teachers and to provide adequate facilities for their learning. Nevertheless, we’re not relenting we continue to do our best with the little resources at our disposal.
In the health sector, we realise there is a high mortality rate among children and women as their environment exposes them to all kinds of diseases such as missiles, hepatitis, chicken pox, malaria typhoid etc, and no good medical facilities in the village here. The primary health care system is not equipped and cannot cater for the population. There is an urgent need for a hospital to reduce the suffering and untimely death of children and pregnant women.
In the area of security, it has been a nightmare for our community in the past two years. The bandits and kidnappers have invaded the village at different times and kidnapped some prominent persons in our community, but God has been our source of refuge. It was indeed a difficult moment for us and the entire community and as a result, we lost some of our members and lost some churches as some of our parishioners migrated from our community to other neighbouring states for refuge. However, at the moment we are safe and are enjoying peace as we have security forces guarding us.
Finally, it has been a wonderful experience witnessing the good people of Bobi in the Kontagora diocese. We try to make an impact through our presence and interaction with the people every day in the community despite some of the challenges we encounter we are happy and optimistic that things will be better again in the future.
FR. AMBI EMMANUEL, SMA
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