This series of reflections draws on materials shared by those present in Oudah, earlier this year for the launch of our Jubilee celebrations. They engage with the written traces of the colloquium an attempt to dwell with the textures that emerged from those voices. The materials shared over during that time carry presence: a felt sense of the questions that stirred, the silences that held meaning, the language that tried to stretch towards something faithful. This is an interpretation shaped by reading and reflection, by listening in from the edges, and by holding the documents with care. It does not claim to speak for the gathering, only to witness to what remains alive in its aftermath.
Each piece will stand on its own, yet together they trace a journey: through the voices of the pioneer sisters, the history of mission, the metaphor of the shoreline, and the challenges and hopes of the future.
Gathering in Ouidah
At the end of April 2025, members of the OLA and SMA family gathered in Ouidah, Benin, to begin the launch of the Jubilee celebrations. For three days they stood on ground that holds both sorrow and hope, a place where lives were torn apart and where the first tentative steps of mission were taken. Over 170 OLA sisters and friends were present, together with SMA Fathers, seminarians, and participants from across many countries. Irish sisters in attendance were Sr Janet Nutakor and Sr Gabrielle Farrell, District Councillors, Sr Kathleen Mc Garvey, and Congregational Leader Sr Mary T Barron.
Ouidah stood within the gathering as a place that spoke its own story. The shoreline here carries the memory of countless departures and arrivals, some forced, some chosen. It was along this coast that the earliest OLA sisters stepped into an unknown future, carrying little beyond their faith and a deep trust in the call they had received.
The gathering opened in Ouidah with an interfaith prayer, a shared recognition of place and of one another. In a setting where histories of division run deep, to begin by standing together in prayer offered a deeply spiritual act of relationship and mutual respect. It recalled the OLA commitment to walk alongside others without seeking to impose, and to remain present in spaces where trust grows slowly.
On the second day the colloquium, Mission Yesterday, Today and the Future, invited deeper reflection on our shared mission. Across the day, different voices invited those present to listen again to our shared story of mission, and to remain attentive to what it may reveal for our own time.
Seeing as They Saw
The Pioneer Sisters of the African Missions brought the voices of the first sisters to the heart of the gathering in Benin. Through their words, read and held with great care by Sister Clarisse Soubeiga, the community was drawn into the texture of those early years. The letters spoke without pretence: of exhaustion, of quiet joys, of loss, of endurance, of a love that had to be learned day by day in unfamiliar soil.
What emerged through these voices resists easy telling. They offer candid witness, glimpses into the ordinary cost of mission: a sister weeping in the chapel, asking for the strength to go on; classrooms half-filled; a dispensary filled with the sick and blind; homes too poor to shelter the children who came; a joy discovered in the midst of exhaustion.
They spoke of the uncertainty of beginning again in unfamiliar places, and of a faith that remained steady even when the work itself felt exposed. Again and again, the writing returns to what could be given, and to what could not. There is no attempt to explain this life, only the steady rhythm of presence and absence, of beginning and continuing in the face of uncertainty. The sisters’ words do not seek to resolve anything, they ask only that we remain open to listening, without haste.
In the background of their words was a constant awareness of risk and loss, the stark recognition of their own mortality, and a refusal to be undone by this reality. To listen to these voices coming to us across history, is to be unsettled. They do not offer a finished model of mission. They invite us into the humility of beginning again, of accepting the unfinished nature of our work, even in contexts we do not fully understand.
Their witness speaks into the present day, calling us to a deeper attentiveness. What does it mean to see as they saw, to meet the demands of the world today with the same clarity of purpose, the same steadiness of heart? As we move toward 2026, we continue to sit within the discernment this question invites.
Part 2: The History of the SMA and OLA Mission in Africa (coming 27 August)
Part 3: The Coast as a Metaphor for Encounter (coming 3 September)
Part 4: The Future of Mission from the African Perspective (coming 10 September)