'My enemies will bury me'

Dan Noud has his funeral instructions written down. They include that his enemies will have to carry his coffin and dig his grave when the time comes to bury him in Tanzania.

"I've picked a very stony bit of ground, and I'm praying that it will also be pissing rain on them while they dig," he grins.

Maybe that's not a very priestly idea, but Dan Noud is not your ordinary priest. After 42 years in the same diocese in Tanzania, you probably get a local perspective on life.

"Don't get me wrong -- I forgive my enemies already, but they should have to do a bit of penance."



As to who those 'enemies' are, he's coy. But they'll be tapped on the shoulder when the time comes, and according to the local tradition they won't have a choice to refuse. Though why should a missionary priest have enemies anyway?

"Well, God is clever. He lets you have enemies so you can forgive them ..."



Dan has written down a lot of his life, and he has told many stories about it too. But the summary is simple: a constant fight for his parishioners against sickness, disease, depression and hunger. Not to mention political corruption, which might well be where some of those enemies came from.

Along the way he has also given many people in his part of Tanzania a lot of hope, sometimes helped give them their lives, and has been midwife, doctor, ambulance driver, teacher, social worker and even undertaker to them. All untrained.

He has also built schools, a medical centre, a couple of churches. And he lives in a steel container, placed on top of another which is used as a secure storehouse for the often meagre supplies of food and medicines he keeps for his parishioners in Mogitu.

Not so secure that he doesn't sleep with a pistol by his side, in order to fight off thieves who will happily murder to get their way.



Dan's work is well known throughout mid-Kildare because he has been supported by a loose grouping of friends around Kilcullen, Newbridge and Naas who raise funds and the materials needed in Mogitu and nearby Nangwa, his first parish in the region. They call themselves TOIL, and there are groans in many households every two or three years when word gets out that Dan is 'home' and somehow the whole thing has to be started again.

This time, he's not on the mooch for anything major. Yet. "Though I need to bring back €3,000 for food," he told me recently.

He's looking his age this time. He had a bad year healthwise, initially with a foot problem that required a number of operations to fix, threatening him with septicaemia in the process. Then, during his convalescence, which wasn't in a comfortable nursing home but working away on his mission with the normal privations which that entailed, he got food poisoning.

So he's lost a lot of weight, is somewhat hunched, but says he's improving. Unlike things back in Mogitu and Nangwa, where the crops have failed again.

It's a long way and time from when he was born, in Brownstown, in 1936. "The same year as Michael Smurfit and Tony O'Reilly, which is about all I share with them," he recalls with a wry expression.

And from an early age he wanted to be a priest. A Cistercian, actually. Until the recruiting priests came to discuss bringing the young boy to Terenure for his primary education and told his father it would be fifty pounds a year.

"And when do we get this fifty pounds?" his father asked, then showed the priests the door when they told him that he'd be the one paying the money.

Eventually, after doing some growing up in London, Dan came back and joined the Pallotines in Thurles. It was the start of a career that could be described, in Swahili, as 'shaghalabagala'.

"It means topsy-turvy'," he smiles, "or that's as close as I can get to the English. I think mostly in Swahili these days, can't always find the English word for what I want to say."

If you want to help Dan, there's a bridge card game event on in the Parish Centre on Sunday.

Brian Byrne.