The street child who became a priest

Apr 29, 2015

IVORY COAST: At first, the visitor is struck by the clusters of 10 to 12-year-old children gravitating around Fr Jean Ollo Kansie. The priest, 34, cannot walk around Bouake without people calling out his name as soon as they see his slender silhouette and unfailing smile. He knows the streets and trails in Ivory Coast’s second largest city where he has been living for the last four years by heart. The local population, which for 10 years formed the “capital” of the forces opposed to former president Laurent Ghagbo, suffers from severe poverty.

The street children who beg outside the restaurants are also quick to spot Fr Jean. He is the director of the children’s home which receives some 30 youngsters a day, to teach them how to read and write and help them acquire a trade. When he is not at the home, it means he has gone to the center for educating poor girls, located 30 minutes from Bouake by a dirt road. Proud to show visitors around the two centers, he says little about himself.

Only once the temperature cools somewhat at nightfall, and he returns to the community where he lives with four other brothers, does he agreed to talk about his past. Why has he made this commitment to children? “Twenty-five years ago, I was in the same position.” Sitting back in one of the old armchairs in the living room, he recounted his own itinerary without any false modesty: his Burkinabe origins, his birth in Abidjan, and then his father’s sudden illness that plunged the family into utter poverty within the space of a few months. “Almost from one day to the next, we were forced to leave Ivory Coast and go to Burkina Faso, where my parents came from. We didn’t know anyone there,” he recalls.

He talked about the years spent with four brothers and sisters in one very small room: living in the street, begging and nights spent outdoors. “We would go into the bush looking for wood and sell it in the city,” the young priest recalls. He learned to weave baskets at a very young age. The father of one of his friends taught him how to read, and when he became a teenager, he discovered an activity center in his neighbourhood run by priests of St Vincent de Paul. “It was the trigger. These men were taking care of children. I wanted to do the same thing.”

This encounter, combined with that of an uncle in the priesthood, pushed the young man to embrace the Catholic faith after having been raised in a family of animists-turned-Protestants. “I loved the reggae man side of Jesus, who lived on virtually nothing and faced the future without fear. But I was also attracted by the way the Christians lived fraternal charity and the link between that solidarity and their joy.”

To explain his itinerary, Fr Jean also discusses the role of his elder sister, who was omnipresent in his life. “As soon as my father fell ill, Corinne abandoned her studies to take care of us. She raised us entirely, as Mama was busy caring for her husband.” Today, their father is dead and their mother severely disabled.

“My sister always believed in me and encouraged me. Without her, I would never have obtained my high school diploma or gone on to complete theology studies. When she died after a serious depression in 2009, I realized that she had never really escaped from poverty. It was a year before my ordination.” Six years later, the memory is still extremely painful and it spurs him to action. “Whenever I become discouraged, she pushes me to do even more,” he says simply.

A few hours earlier, when Fr Jean was watching the children amusing themselves after lunch, he confided: “When I look at these children, the difficulties they encounter and how they keep going on, I see myself. In the end, I think that all this has helped to reconcile me with my own history.” --Global Pulse