christmas in parakou

  “No one’ll be going home. We’ll be sleeping at the NGO tonight,” said Daniel, and I didn’t know if he was kidding. The staff at Victory Way – Daniel, Nicole, Angela, and Eugene (with the occasional addition of Therese and Herve) had pulled all-nighters before when they had some important project going on. And tomorrow – Christmas Eve – was going to be important. Some eighty-eight orphans and at-risk children, all under the age of twelve, were going to be coming to the NGO for a Christmas party tomorrow, and there were presents to wrap, cards to address, food and drink to prepare, cotton to glue on to the Santa costume, and the thousand last-minute negotiations to be made with the people who had agreed to transport the orphans.

 The whole thing had been Nicole’s idea. Ever since she was a child (the last of five daughters) growing up in Grand-Popo, she had wanted to help abandoned children. In the course of time, she had become the director of an NGO which had taken on the care and schooling of more than 300 orphans in Northern Benin, but she wanted to do something special at Christmas for the youngest and nearest of them, for the primary school students in the Parakou area. “We can call it ‘Noël de Sans-Noël’,” she explained. “Christmas for the Christmasless. There are children who go to bed hungry on Christmas Day, who have never gotten so much as a hug or a kiss for Christmas. We’ll have a party for them… we won’t ask for money, just for presents for the kids. For whatever people can give.”

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