Rude Awakenings

Dimanche…

Normally thunderstorms don’t wake me and are very soothing for me to fall asleep to. Not here. This African superstorm (or at least seemed like a superstorm) woke me up at 4 in the morning and kept me up for an hour. Just when I was about to fall asleep, something else surprised the heck out of me and also made me wonder what I had gotten myself into – a bell. One very large and centrally located bell in the middle of the monastery started ringing at 5 a.m., and then again at 5:15, 5:30, 6, and 6:30. Good God how many times can they ring the damn thing. I get it; you are expert bell ringers now let me SLEEP! I later found out that the bells were respectively a wake –up call, lectio devina, preparation for morning prayer, and morning prayer. There was also a bell at 7:30 for breakfast, that was the one bell I was happy to hear considering that I had thought that I had slept through breakfast.

Just before that last bell, I found Colin in the room next to me and contemplated whether or not we had in fact slept through the most important meal of the day (for Americans). I also took a little bit of time to take some pictures of the dew/leftover rain on some of the flowers outside of my door.

After breakfast, Colin and I wondered around trying to get a lay of the land and trying to find random things to fix up our rooms (the main one being a dust rag). While tracking down those supplies I made the acquaintance of a bright-eyed kid named Erico and his friend Mathieu. They were working for the monastery over the course of summer vacation. They ended up following me around at a distance until I finally asked if they wanted to play a game of cards. Of course they did, who wouldn’t want to play with a brand new deck of American playing cards (thanks to the Whitakers). They tried teaching me one of their games, which I picked up on rather quickly and then I tried teaching them huit Americans. It went fairly well, but I can safely say that they are now expert players!

After cards it was time for mass, yes Br. Paul, I am still going to mass and you’ll be happy to know that I attend more prayer/mass services than a majority of the monks! And that was after they told me that I wasn’t a monk and was not expected to follow the schedule of the monks’ prayer times. Anywho, the homily for the mass was roughly 45 minutes long and spoken in rapid French using many words that were unfamiliar to me. I daydreamed a little. I mostly thought about how in the world I was going to be able to understand any of what he was saying after only 9 months (I am getting better at it as you will later read).

After mass came supper, with the 5 sisters who again said nothing to us, but did stare at us for a better part of the meal. And whenever we caught them in the act, they quickly looked away and pretended to be busy eating. Psch girls. It got began to get dark throughout the course of the meal so Colin and I decided to skip night prayer in order to read in the remaining daylight and then by candlelight for a while before calling it a night.

Point of notification, it gets dark here around 7 p.m. and so everything afterwards is dark with the exception of night prayer and/or mass during which the small generator is turned on. Neither Colin nor myself have been able to figure out which nights have which service and we are fairly certain that some of the monks don’t know either as we seem to always get a roundabout answer. We are still trying to figure it out, but may be close to the solution!