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The Blogging Nun
March, 2007
March 26, 2007
Health Care Matters
We are in a health care crisis!!!!
For 15 years the Sisters of St. Joseph responded to this crisis by providing a network of eleven clinics to serve people who are uninsured.
We’ve leverage broad community-wide support through these St. Mary’s Health Clinics. The clinics are located in donated space, and more than 200 health care professionals, including physicians, nurses, translators, and admissions personnel volunteer their services and health care organizations donate or significantly reduce the cost of health services provided to patients.
Still, the numbers of uninsured Minnesotans continues to grow.
Today we need everyone’s help. Let me suggest one simple, fun way to be part of the greatest health care solution in America so far. Come to the Carondelet Gala.
Each year the Sisters’ Ministries Foundation sponsors the Carondelet Gala. All proceeds help fund St. Mary’s Health Clinics. Attending the Gala is a fabulous way to have fun and literally save lives.
The cost for the Carondelet Gala is only $150. That’s a small price to pay if it’s your wife or child or parent who becomes deathly ill and is uninsured. At the Gala you meet hundreds of others who are proud to be a part of the St. Mary’s Health Clinics as well.
The Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet established a network of health clinics to help provide a critical safety net for the unmet and increasing health care needs of the hard working poor uninsured in Minnesota through neighborhood-based clinics.
The St. Mary’s Health Clinics provide free primary health care as well as medically necessary out patience, inpatient, specialist services and prescription medications to patients who otherwise would go with out health care. In addition, St. Mary’s Health Clinics reduce health disparities among uninsured Minnesotans by providing health education and outreach services.
The impact of providing health services to the uninsured is several times greater than the number of patients individually served and their health restored—important as that is. By providing care, St. Mary’s Health Clinics impact the community in the following ways:
· Stronger families (families can suffer emotionally and financially when even a single member is uninsured and lacks access to health care.)
· Increased economic productivity (The Institute of Medicine estimates that the lost economic value of lack of insurance and lack of access to health care is between $65 billion and $130 billion annually.)
· Increased personal or family income due to reduced losses from illness from employment
· Increased public health in the community (e.g. higher immunization rates, control of infectious diseases)
· Reduced burden of uncompensated care (nationally worth about $35 billion in 2001)
· Increased social equality
There are nearly 444,000 uninsured Minnesota residents, according to a Robert Wood Johnson survey. The uninsured are up to four times as likely to experience an avoidable hospitalization or require emergency care. Early access to health care services can prevent costly intensive care and emergency room visits.
Everyday we hear someone say, “Something should be done about the health care crisis!” Here is your chance. Come to the 2007 Carondelet Gala! Call the Sister of St. Joseph Ministries Foundation for more information: 651-690-7018.
You will be proud of yourself for coming! You can make a difference.
Possumus!
Gala Information
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March 19, 2006
The Story of a Sister of St. Joseph
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As a Sister of St. Joseph, I join hundreds of women who choose to give their entire life to help others. Each Sister is a story onto herself. One woman who joined us a few years ago, Suzanne Herder, comes with an amazing story! My friend Chuck MacDonald recently interviewed Suzanne so that you may come to know her as well. I am delighted to be able to offer her story to you.
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There is a song sometimes sung in faith communities and elsewhere that speaks to the circles of life and part of the song says,
“No straight lines make up my life; And all my roads have bends; There’s no clear-cut beginnings, And so far no dead-ends”
- (song verses from “All My Life’s A Circle”
- by Harry Chapin)
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When anyone of us reach beyond fifty years of living, there are stories that need to be told and this one is about life circles and the story of Sister Suzanne Herder, CSJ, St. Paul, Minnesota.
Some people can tell you that very early on they knew what they wanted to be in life. Suzanne says she always wanted to a religious sister. This idea did not spring from a deeply Catholic home. Suzanne’s parents lived at a time when the rigidity of religion defined their marriage as ‘mixed.’ Her father was Catholic and her mother a Lutheran. She did not come to her desire to be a sister from attending Catholic school, she went to public schools and she really did not know any religious sisters.
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By the end of the eighth grade she decided to get more serious about this idea of becoming a sister, so her parents allowed her to enroll in a Catholic high school. In the late 50s’ Catholic high schools in the Twin Cities were not co-ed and yes, they all had uniforms. Suzanne Herder graduated from St. Anthony of Padua High School and in late August of 1963 she entered the convent of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet in St. Paul. She was 17 years old. Contemporary history documents the fact that following the end of World War II there was a dramatic rise in young women and men entering religious life. The horrors of a world at war led many of them to want to do something to make the world a different place. Unfortunately, the seminaries and religious communities of the time were still structured to serve a measuring God. Books have been written on these highly regulated systems. For many the desire to minister to others clashed with the suffocating rules of community life. After five years in training for religious living, Suzanne knew she needed to put this idea of being a religious sister aside and left the convent. The year was 1969.
Losing your dream at any age is depressing. Suzanne was 23 and she felt very lost. She stayed with relatives for a short time and then got a job selling furniture. Not unusual, except there very few women at that time who sold furniture. The upside of working in an all male world is that it did in time come to provide a dating life and that was followed by a proposal for marriage. Her husband stayed in the furniture business and she started to teach. They had two daughters now grown women. They tried for years to find common interests, they knew religion was not one of them. After ten years they divorced and so for the next twenty years Suzanne built a life as best she could as a single parent. Her teaching career took her into the field of Special Education and the last years of her teaching life she spent with emotionally disturbed high school students.
“All my life’s a circle, but I can’t tell you why; Seasons spinning round again; The years keep rollin by.”
Suzanne Herder’s spiritual journey during the years as a divorced parent and teacher were not easy. She tried several Catholic churches and because of her marriage and daughters; she had attended a good number of Lutheran services as well. She did donate her limited free time to the Hope Community in Minneapolis, which is dedicated to helping to hold problematic families together. Suzanne was searching and people in a search always have their radar up looking and listening for some sense of direction. So often it comes in a casual remark. Someone mentioned that she try attending church at St. Stephen’s in Minneapolis. Taking the suggestion she began to feel comfortable in this community.
“I found you a thousand times; I guess you done the same; But then we lose each other; It’s like a children’s game.”
The St. Stephen’s Community is like Joseph’s coat of many colors and some of the strongest threads are the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet who attend church there. Suzanne began to rediscover bits and pieces of her long forgotten dream, the one she had as a young woman who wanted to live in community and work in a ministry to others. As the months and years past she found herself going out to breakfast with a couple of the Sisters and then having supper with other Sisters. She started to join them in prayer gatherings. In the year 2000 she became a ‘consociate’ joining other lay women and men in a spiritual partnership with the Sisters. One day she simply asked herself if she wanted to once again to consciously choose to live a life of simplicity in community and in ministry to others. Her answer was a firm “ yes”.
So much of religious life had changed since the 1960s when she had left. The Sisters of St. Joseph quietly and sometimes not so quietly had begun to revolutionize themselves. They had for over a hundred years run schools and hospitals, but many of the Sisters wanted more direct contact with the poor and those in need. They wanted to become more involved in the peace and justice movements; they did want to continue to teach women how to lead but they also wanted to minister to women and children whose lives were broken. The various new ministries the Sisters have started are a testimony to their understanding of true call of the Scriptures.
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The dream of a young girl to help others and to live in a supporting community of women who minister to others was finally realized by Suzanne in her late 50s. On November 3, 2005 she walked down a chapel aisle and in the presence of her mother, her daughters and her grandchildren she took vows to live in religious life and a circle of her life came round. Today Suzanne serves as the director for the St. Joseph Worker Program. This program invites lay women committed to social change to live in community for one year and work in one or more of the ministries developed by the Sisters of St. Joseph. Each year she welcomes a dozen or so women into temporary community as St. Joseph Workers. |
It is poetic that a woman, who struggled in her early 20s with religious life, would in her early 60s help to create it for others. Now she sees religious life to be one of being communion with others and to intentionally stand with the poor and with the people of God.
“As I find you here again; A thought runs through my mind; Our love is like a circle, Let’s go round one more time.” |
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Sister Suzanne Herder, CSJ can be reached in St. Paul, MN
Director, St. Joseph Workers
1884 Randolph Ave
St. Paul, MN 55105
651.696.2762 or sjw@csjstpaul.org. |
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March 12, 2007
More from Sister Rosita
Our report from Sister Rosita in Kenya continues:
February 14, 2007:
Laban and Jack put me on the bus to Kadel. I got to ride in the cab with the driver and another passenger who I got acquainted with on the way. Harrison Charo-Karisa is a fresh water fishery consultant and village trainer. He had three offices in the district (Kisumu, Kisii and a village before Kendu Bay). Harrison had educational experiences in Kauai, Vietnam, Philippines, Egypt and Kenya. He was from Mombasa and had gone to several higher institutions to earn a doctorate. He gave me his autographed book on, “Selection for Growth of Nile Tilapia in Low Input Environments.” Harrison works with a government related agency that also accesses private funding for his work.
February 15, 2007: Spent the day resting and scraping off the layer of dried skin on my arms and legs left by the severe allergic reaction a week ago. I learned how to wear a lesu (wrap around skirt) for comfort and to fit into the cultural expectations for women in the area. I still wear pants underneath it because I haven’t quite conquered the knack of keeping the wrap around secure. Rose Mary, our house keeper, and I spend most of the day together. Since Sisters Mary Conrad and Christoff are away in Asumbi at the funeral of one of their sisters who died suddenly, food is scarce in the house. Rose Mary was able to conjure up a wonderful lunch of a tomato omelet, rice and collards. Pickings for dinner were beans and rice and a half green mango that I seasoned with salt (a throw back of my youth when I took salt and pepper shakers to eat mangoes while resting in a secure nest of branches.)
February 16, 2007: Walked over to the Rectory to have an extended breakfast of bananas and chai with Father Gregory. We talked about the need to have the parishioners and villagers involved with upgrading and repairing the borehole/rain catchment systems on the property. Father Gregory will have a parish meeting on March 3, 2007 at which time we will have an opportunity to organize for the compound improvements. The property has good possibilities of being a community education center if the facilities and water systems could be improved. Father gave me a cost estimate to improve the rain catchment system done recently by a parishioner who knows how to repair the cisterns and connections.
We then walked over to the parish meeting hall to meet the “HAPPEN PROJECT STAFF” and volunteers. The acronym means the “HIV/AIDS Prevention, Protection Empowerment Network. Three staff persons are hired by the Homa Bay Diocese and the St. Camillus Mission Project to train peer volunteers to go into district schools to give education and advice to youth between the ages of 10 to 18 years. An estimated 80% of these youth are still uninfected so there is an urgent need to reach them with the correct information and to change behaviour throw various means.
2/17/2007: Sister Mary James, the social worker residing in the parish convent, and I talked about her work. She has a women’s group of about 40 who she wants to help with income generation projects. Some of the women are widows. She has been educating them about HIV and encouraging them to be tested when they feel more confident. The group needs help with materials to begin some of their income generation. If there was a certified kitchen with an oven, the women will be able to make bread to sell in the markets. Sister also wants to teach them how to make table covers.
Sister Mary James and I spent half of the day attending and participating in the HIV/AIDS training sessions conducted by the HAPPEN staff. At the conclusion of the workshop, I met with Jered and Polycarp about the problems they have encountered during the project’s first year.
The staff trained about 188 volunteers in 26 parishes who visited 400 schools. They have trained peer volunteers in 215 schools. The staff needs to be expanded to reach all the parishes to train and evaluate the program. The staff needs four wheel vehicles, audio-visual equipment and supplies, and adequate educational facilities to conduct training. Most of all they need to provide monetary incentives to their volunteers to keep them working. Their volunteers need to earn income for their families. The staff has lost many volunteers because they cannot function without bringing in income for their families.
Later in the day, I met the nine women in the Monica Women’s Group shelling peanuts outside of Mary Lieta’s apartment. These women have the honey production/processing business as well. Sister Christoff later told me that the group is composed of widows who have renounced the inheritance tradition and willingly wanted to remain unmarried. Their wishes have been respected by their clan elders. It may be that their husbands’ properties were taken over by their brothers in law.
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March 9, 2007
Rosita - More News From Africa
Our report from Sister Rosita in Kenya continues:
February 13, 2007:
Woke up early and had breakfast with John Lange. Edward appeared at 6 A.M. to drive me to Jomo Kenyatta Airport for my flight. I had called Laban Okun the day before to pick me up at the Kisumu airport. We drove to his home adjacent to the orphanage for a late breakfast of fried eggs, rice and beans and baked squash. The social worker, Jackton Amayo, had given me a thorough tour of the orphanage facilities before breakfast. After that, Laban introduced me to the two sisters who organized a cooperative of 27 widows in Nyahera. Laban, Lillian and Rosa Awnor Odhiambo, Jackton and I headed for Nyahera, a hillside village east of Kisumu, that had been depopulated of males who died of AIDS. We headed for Agnes Oriedo’s home to visit the ceramic planter pot-making site.
Agnes was widowed in 1979 with five children to raise. She was a housewife with no skills, so she prostituted herself to feed the children. As a result, she ended up with four more children to care for in the process. Fortunately, she enrolled in an economic development class for pottery making where she learned how to make the planter pots. She became the teacher of the Bonde Widows and Orphans Group. Agnes found a cache of available clay near her home. The clay was harvested, pounded, and formed into pots by the widows and the few males left in the village. The pots are lined up inside and outside of Agnes’ house to dry. She has an open firing pit besides her house that is lined with the dry pots, piled high with shrubbery and other branches and topped with a layer of dry grass. When the grass is burned at the top, the pots are properly fired.
Some of the widows carry fired pots on their heads to market them. Some are broken in transit. The pots are sold for about 40 schillings apiece. We then inspected the clay deposits nearby. The first cache was now an irregular shaped pond about 3’ deep and about 15’ wide. A new deposit is now being harvested a few feet away.
We walked to the newly built village chapel where the women gather the orphans and village children to teach them about Jesus and the Bible. We then reboarded the van to visit some of the widows’ homes scattered along the hillside. The homes are of mud construction and plastered with cow dung. The roofs are either galvanized metal or of thatched grass. The floors are compacted mud stamped with a fabric design, more likely of burlap. Wooden furniture with thin foam mattresses are usually lined against the living room walls. The homes generally have two rooms and a small kitchen in the back. Small farms surround the home. The usual collard, maize, sweet potato, and tapioca crops are planted. Mangos and bananas are also grown.
Among the widows we visited were two who appeared to be dying of AIDS. The 50-year-old had small tumors growing from her right hip and was in a very weakened condition. The 24-year-old widow had left her homestead so she could be cared for by her mother. Her 6-year-old son looked distressed as the grandmother explained his confusion about his mother’s condition. The grandmother is part of the women’s cooperative but has had to return to prostitution at times to feed her daughter and grandson.
In another home, the grandmother was crippled so that her five grandchildren who had lost their parents had to be raised by their 14-year-old brother. He could not afford to go to school and is presently trying to farm his grandmother’s small plot.
About 75% of the widows are HIV infected. Most are on ARV drugs but must walk a distance to the public clinic to obtain their meds.
Laban explained that the Luo inheritance law deemed that a father split his land holdings among his sons and so on. Farms, as a result, may be an acre or less. Daughters are expected to be married off to other families. The law also deemed that widows and their homesteads may be taken over by her husband’s brother. In some instances, the uncle has turned out his brother’s family who become quite destitute. They, in turn, may go to the city to try to survive by marketing whatever they can including their bodies. Laban’s orphanage takes many orphans referred by the government who either are street children or who have no willing relatives to care for them.
In the evening, Jack and I sat in Laban’s office to interview as many of the 28 orphans residing in the two dorms. The orphanage has its own primary school that is now up to class four. Those who are older attend schools nearby. The need for tuition for secondary education is also a crying need. Presently, Laban has three older boys who are waiting for funding and acceptance into a secondary school or to a college. His social worker, Jackton, also wants to further his education in economic development so he can help the 56 widows MFA helps in their district of Mambolayo Gajulu. Right now, MFA helps with medicines, counseling and encouragement.
More to come…
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March 7, 2007
Sister Rosita - News from Africa
In the short three weeks that Sister Rosita Aranita, CSJ has been in Kenya, she has befriended the village, established a local leadership committee, uncovered root problems, prioritized needs, and begun work. The problems are solvable given the right resources and right approach.
Rosita is an amazing study in community development. I invite you to read along. Become familiar with the names and places. You will be hearing about them again.
Here’s the news from Sister Rosita in Kenya:
February 11, 2007:
Spent half of the day with Maryknoll Father John Lange, who celebrated Sunday liturgy in two of the five parishes in the slum of Makuru. Makuru has about 250,000 Catholics from diverse tribes who came from the rural districts to find a better life in Nairobi only to be housed in the slums with shanty housing, no trash collection and limited access to a water spigot. The liturgies were glorious celebrations with rhythmic songs, drumming and dancing. Children are trained to dance in synchrony at the procession, Gloria, offertory and communion thanksgiving. They precede the lectors to the altar in celebration of the Word.
Collections comprise of shillings of one, five, and ten denominations, the offering of the poor. At the offertory, some food for the priests and the poor is brought up in baskets. They usually are eggs, bread and fruit like bananas and pineapples. At noon, we had lunch with Father Patrick a Holy Ghost priest who lives with John Lange on the outskirts of the slum. A deacon was also invited to lunch of duck, rice, collards, fruit salad and a pineapple crisp dessert. John and I headed back to the Maryknoll Fathers & Brothers Guest House where I was able to complete my reports, transfer them to a flash drive and e-mail them successfully to the sisters in St. Paul and Hawai’i and a list of friends.
More to come…
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March 5, 2007
Love = Change
The headlines are filled with greed, contempt, war, and crimes of all sorts. If I were to dig out last weeks papers, it would be the same. If I were to predict next week’s headlines, it would be more of the same as well.
It’s easy to love our friends, and easy to help someone in need, but what about this loving one’s enemy that we’ve heard about since our youth? When I was young, I thought my parents and teachers really meant just to tolerate or ignore them or at least refrain from unkind words. But love them? No.
I was wrong. Loving enemies is essential.
Ego set aside, it’s possible to be conscious of a loving presence that totally surrounds each of us equally. Those aware of this reality find it impossible to harm anyone or anything. Those unaware need the rest of us to send them love — enough to break through to their consciousness to awaken in them the realization of the unconditional love in which they, too, are held.
By loving our enemies, we change. They may change as well. If we all change, the headlines will change. For those of us alive today who want to leave the world a better place for the next generations, it’s worth the effort. Send love to your enemies.
Possumus.
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March 1, 2007
Lessons in Snow
Warnings of 10-15 inches of snow turn conversations to spectacular stories of survival, travel fiascos or best of all, skiing! I learned a life-lesson on the slopes one day that profoundly changed my reality.
I was a new skier and about to descend the Highlands in Scotland. Mountaintop signs directed beginners, intermediate and advanced skiers to different paths. Without hesitation my friends and I chose the easy one. Though I haven’t skied in years, I can still feel that euphoric, cleansing feeling of racing downhill.
All was well until we came to the end of the run where the path disappeared down a cliff that had no margin of error between the 90 degree turn at the end and a boulder-strewn stream bed. It wasn’t pretty, but I made it down alive. Thinking we had taken a wrong turn somewhere, we went up again, only to end in the spot. We survived, barely.
I remember realizing how life is like this. We believe we are on unique paths, moving at our own pace, and following our own dreams but up ahead is an unforeseen twist or turn that brings us into “someone else’s” reality.
I have deep compassion for those who struggle on paths that feel hopeless. They are we. In truth, we are all headed for the same slope.
The snow outside my window has reached blizzard conditions. When it’s over, my neighbors and I will help each other move cars, shovel sidewalks, and plow driveways to get us all back to normal.
The challenge is to remember to help the dear neighbor even when it appears our lives are “back to normal.” Somewhere, someone else’s life just took a bad turn and needs a hand up.
Possumus!
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