MISSIONER TALES
I first learned of the concept of accompaniment, of “walking with the people,” from the Maryknoll Sisters. This, I thought, is the ministry to which I am being called here in Nicaragua.
Missioner Tales January/February 2020
I was part of a pastoral team that had the responsibility for the parish of Capinota, Bolivia, which consisted of about 30 villages, many of which were nestled in the thinning air of the Andes Mountains. One day to guide us to the isolated village of Calacaja, the campesinos brought a mule for me to ride up the mountain. At first, riding went...
Missioner Tales November/December 2019
I was visiting patients at a medical clinic here in Malakal, South Sudan. I noticed one of the patients, a 5-year-old boy, sitting on a bench waiting for the doctor. The boy had come to the clinic with his mother. He had a painful ear infection that needed treatment. I stopped and said hello to him. We shook hands and I gave him a blessing. Later...
Missioner Tales September/October 2019
As I usually do three times a week, I jumped on the number 800 bus to go to the local seminary here in China. Oddly enough, in this city of some 4 million people, the bus had a lot of open seats that day. I sat down on one of them. All of a sudden, I felt wet. I reached my hand underneath my leg to double-check and bingo: I had chosen the wrong...
Missioner Tales July/August 2019
After eight years in São Paulo, Brazil, our family recently returned to João Pessoa, a coastal city at the most eastern point of the Americas, where we had previously served with the Maryknoll Lay Missioners. In order to reconnect with partners and explore ministry possibilities, my husband, Flávio, and I are visiting several communities. I was...
Missioner Tales May/June 2019
During my first month in Shariatpur town in Bangladesh, where I visit the sick poor and often accompany them to the hospital, a woman gently turned down my invitation to take her, her husband and their disabled son to a Dhaka hospital. I later returned to see them and learn if there had been any change in the 9-year-old boy’s health. No, nothing....
Missioner Tales March / April 2019
When I was living among the Aymara women in the Andes Mountains of Peru, it was not uncommon to see a woman walking along with her hands in constant motion. Under her arm she would have a large ball of newly shorn wool from an alpaca or sheep. In her hands she would be holding a type of wooden spindle, which was likely homemade. She would grab a...
Missioner Tales January / February 2019
In Venezuela, I lived in barrio Nueva Tacagua. One of my neighbors was an elderly woman named America Lopez, who lived in a one-room shack with her daughter and three grandchildren. People called America La Loca, “the crazy one,” because she often acted out of touch with reality. One day, the late Maryknoll Lay Missioner Jim Sweeney came to our...
Missioner Tales
When I first arrived in Nairobi and was trying to learn how to navigate this capital city of Kenya, I would walk through Kibera, a huge informal settlement—or slum—with a Kenyan friend, Patrick. A member of the Christian Life Community movement, Patrick does volunteer ministry assisting HIV-affected children with education in Kibera. He visits...
Missioner Tales
Making do is sometimes all you can do inside the United Nations camp for internally displaced people in Malakal, South Sudan, where I serve as a Maryknoll missioner. Recently, that meant improvising a one-wheeled ambulance to get a couple of ailing women to the camp’s Doctors Without Borders hospital. The Catholic community at the camp, which was...
