Father Biney

After this story was done, Sister Joana invited me on a month-long trip to Ghana with her. She hadn't been home in four years and was going home for her brother's wedding. I photographed everything I saw and recorded interviews and sounds along the way and created a few multimedia pieces about the different things I encountered.

When I arrived I stayed in a seminary in a small town not far from Kumasi. I was there for a week meeting and making friends with many priests, seminarians, and other travelers who were living there as well, from all over the world. Everyone there was so welcoming, which helped with being so far away from home.

One of the amazing people Sister Joana introduced me to was Father Joseph Biney, a priest who worked with Sister in Nigeria. Father Biney let me stay with him for a few days while Sister visited her family in her home town a little ways away. Father Biney did an interview for me about his many churches and the work that he does for his people. He travels all over larger towns with roads and through tiny villages where people will walk miles to hear him because it is their closest church (and only affordable form of transportation). It was amazing to see how dedicated and faithful people are, and how they really would travel by foot for miles to go to church.

This piece was one made about Father and three of his churches. The main one is right outside his home in the seminary, the second is in a small village that we took many winding dirt roads to get to, and the last one is a church-in-progress. Each week Father tells the community they need to contribute money to finish the church because right now they are worshiping under unsturdy bricks and a shade. Father talked and showed me many things on my visit but his duty to the church and his people are the most important things in his life and I wanted to share that part of his story next.

Below are three photographs, one from each church we visited, that were taken during my stay with him, as well as a multimedia slideshow I created. These photos, and a few more, can also be viewed in the "Stories" set of my Flickr account: 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kdalrymple/. The multimedia slideshow about Father Biney can be viewed in a larger window on my vimeo account http://vimeo.com/kdalrymple.