By Mary Ellen Manz, M.M.

After 60 years in the Marshall Islands, the Maryknoll Sisters hand on their ministry to the people

 

The 50 first-graders were busily struggling to copy the strange marks that their teacher, Maryknoll Sister Rose Patrick St. Aubin, promised would be their name. Ten of the students were victims of a polio epidemic that struck the Marshall Islands in the 1960s. The public school on Majuro, the largest of the islands, had refused to admit the handicapped children, but St. Aubin encouraged their acceptance at Assumption School, which the Maryknoll Sisters administered. “Those children had no place else to go,” says St. Aubin, “so, of course, we wanted them.”

 

Teaching as Jesus did—without discrimination—has always been the goal of the Maryknoll Sisters in their ministry on the Marshall Islands. Now, after 60 years, the Sisters are putting that ministry in the capable hands of the local people.

 

As she leaves the Marshalls, St. Aubin fondly looks back on her six decades in this Pacific paradise, which has become more like home to her than her native Appleton, Wis. She can still see those struggling students, including little Jackson, who couldn’t hold a pencil in his paralyzed hands. “I showed him how to put the pencil between his toes and hold the paper with his other foot,” says St. Aubin, smiling as she reports how after days of effort, he wrote his name, to the applause of his classmates. “He completed high school and became a radio operator in the Department of Education,” she adds, “which is important in the Marshall Islands, where communication is mostly done by two-way radio.”

 

One of three Maryknoll Sisters who opened the congregation’s mission in the Marshall Islands in 1950, St. Aubin recalls the Sisters’ arrival in Likiep, 150 miles north of Majuro. “Everywhere we looked, there was water,” she says. These Pacific islands north of the Equator, which stretch over 180,000 miles of ocean with a total landmass of just 70 square miles, were until the 1980s only reachable by boat. “I never did get my sea legs,” St. Aubin says with a chuckle.

 

To make matters worse, the Sisters spoke no Marshallese, an oral language that can’t be studied from a textbook. Undaunted, they took on the administration of a small elementary school started by the Jesuits and named Holy Rosary because of the people’s reliance on this devotion when they had no priests during World War II. The Japanese military had forced out the German Sacred Heart missionaries, who had been serving the islands since the 19^th century. After the war, the United Nations named the Pacific network of atolls and islands a Trust Territory of the United States. In 1948, the Jesuits of the New York Province came to serve, followed by the Maryknoll Sisters two years later.

 

“We had to use gestures,” says St. Aubin, recalling those early days, “until little by little we learned words from our students and they learned English from us.”

 

The Sisters administered Holy Rosary in Likiep until 1959, when they turned the school over to the people and moved to Majuro. There they took over Assumption School, which the Jesuits had started. Today, it is the only accredited K–12 school in the Marshall Islands.

 

In addition to their own teaching, the Maryknoll Sisters trained Marshallese teachers, most of whom had no high school diploma when they started. “We only recruited teachers who showed a real desire to teach. The essential for a good teacher isn’t a college degree; it’s motivation and dedication,” says St. Aubin.

 

Over the years, with help from the Maryknoll Sisters, Jesuits, and Marshallese and U.S. governments, teachers on the Outer Islands were able to come to Majuro and take college courses to get their degrees. At times, says St. Aubin, 60 men and women from the Outer Islands would be in teacher training. St. Aubin and Maryknoll Sister Joan Crevcoure of Green Bay, Wis., began a program to train catechists and prayer leaders for the parishes. As more and more Maryknoll Sisters arrived, they established more small schools on the Outer Islands, where they would remain for a month or two at a time providing teacher training.

 

“As poor as most Marshallese parents are, they make sacrifices to send their boys and girls to school and almost all of them now finish elementary school and try to go to high school and college,” says St. Aubin, explaining why education is such an important ministry here.

Having influenced generations of Marshallese in the four parish schools they administered and three public schools they supervised, the Maryknoll Sisters take pride in their students’ accomplishments. Alfred Capelle is one of them. “I was taught by Sister Rose Patrick in first grade as well as my children and grandchildren after me!” says Capelle, who has served as president of the College of the Marshall Islands, Ambassador to the United Nations and deacon in his parish.

 

It’s difficult to imagine living in a place where the ground is only coral and sand, where the only food for most people is fish and copra (the dried meat of the coconut) and where on even the largest island the ocean can be seen from one side to the other. “I’ve never been in an island wider than two city blocks or higher than six feet above sea level,” says Crevcoure. Yet it was under these extremely isolated circumstances that Maryknoll Sisters accepted the challenge to literally go to the ends of the earth to bring the message of God’s love to the people.

 

When the new school year opens this year, it will be the first time in 60 years that the Maryknoll Sisters will not be teaching and training teachers for the churches and schools in the Marshall Islands. But it is not the end of a mission, says Sister Rose Patrick St. Aubin, rather it is the passing on of that mission. For the Maryknoll Sisters, that’s mission accomplished.

 

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