by Sr. Sheila Campbell, MMM Ireland 13.06.2026
In 1940, Sr. M. Elizabeth wrote in her letter home –
“At 5am the alarm goes off and, thinking you are in Ireland, you wonder what the cage of netting is doing all around your bed. Then you realise that you are in Africa and locked in the folds of a mosquito net. Then you remember spending half the night chasing a mosquito which accidently got in somehow before the net was let down the previous evening. You could not imagine anything so tantalising. He comes along and sings a little buzz in your ear and then disappears. A sense of duty compels you to try and catch him in case you would get malaria and you would get no sympathy for your laziness. The next step is to get a match and light your bush lamp and then the chase begins which, I needn’t tell you, is often a lengthy one because he is the size of nothing.”
After reading this I had a memory of sitting in our little chapel in Salvador, Brazil, and casually asking the Sisters: “Does the sound of all these mosquitos not bother you?” They looked at me blankly and then at one another. “There are no mosquitos, Sheila”, Maria ventured.
Then it slowly dawned on me – what I was experiencing was tinnitus, due to hearing loss, and not mosquitos! They are annoying little inscets, but can’t be blamed for everything!!
Sometime after moving from Boyle to Dundalk in 1954 a few neighbours in our estate – Muirhevna – remarked to my mother that my face seemed to be growing very round. They said it in a way that meant I was sick or something. This needed a trip to our doctor who believed there was nothing wrong with me at all and that I was a lovely little girl and so good at answering his questions. Well, they weren’t hard questions for me! The good thing was that the talk of my round face got me a trip to Dublin by train with mammy and a neighbour on December 8th when all the “down country” women went to the city for their Christmas shopping. I was being specially treated and looked after by being brought along whilst my siblings spent the day off school at home in Dundalk with Daddy. They said it was not fair.by Jo Wardhaugh Doyle Ireland 06.06.2026
What saved me from my storm and fire 
Michael Angelo, Glenna Good acre, and August Rodin. These are three magnificent people and their statues, which held my soul long enough to heal. The first time I saw the Pieta was in 1990 in Rome. My eyes opened and I saw with the eye of my soul a stirring pain deep within, from where I did not know. It touched what I thought was grief, and I thought to myself how ridiculous that was, but I looked at the magnificent marble with living sinews in their hands. The large, sad, helplessness over awed me, but the aliveness within the statue filled that area of the Vatican. It would be many years later that I would be triggered into understanding the depth of that original feeling.
Over time I would think of that strength and dire disturbing compassion of holding the lifeless Christ over Mary’s lap. By that time, I was in Attleboro, MA USA doing my War therapy. One of the therapists was a Vietnam veteran, I was intrigued as I grew up watching on TV the nightly horror of that war. These vets had a look about them. Jim Stone was a Vietnam veteran and a therapist.
He made us do our own wall!! I had not realised there was a Vietnam Wall in Washington, but there was. With thousands of names on it RIP. If you stand in front of it, you are in the wall, your reflection and the wall are one. That sums up a lot.
We were to make our own personal wall. We were asked to come to the front of the group and write two people’s names whom we had loved and lost, and we were to verbalise their names.
I feared.
Two by two our classes wall grew. The names of our loved ones that we had lost. From the abyss of my soul, I heard a groaning, a banshee wail, that I was scared to hear. My breath was gone and I stuttered out.
“A man whose name I never knew.”
It was such a shock to me that that grief, loss, breathlessness was there, so deeply embedded within me. The boy really, was killed in Gulu, Uganda in 1981 and I witnessed it. A growing pain erupted. A man whose name I did not know, but I loved him with an intense love and always will. I realised that I have been his witness, his Centinel, for 45 years and I will continue to be.
Worn out completely after that session, I was handed a magazine which contained a wonderful article with photos about The Washington Wall and the surrounding war sculptures.
The first sculpture put up was simply called War Nurses. I saw it and absorbed it. That was me. It was also a modern-day Pieta. There were three nurses. One held the dying body of the nameless soldier over her lap, later I found the sculptor’s name was Glenna Goodacre. She had named that first nurse Hope. The second nurse was an African American woman. She stands looking up towards the medivac helicopter searching the sky for Divine help. She has been called Faith. The last exhausted nurse sitting on the ground was called Charity. She stares at an empty helmet. Reflecting on the psychological tolls of war.
How this statue helped me and accompanied me on my journey. This was my Emmaus walk and they were attending to me all the way. So often people get fed up that you are not fixed. But these war nurses strengthened me through the bewildering journey of war, hatred, vengeance, and grief. A mindless Pandora’s box. Hope, Faith and Charity both counteracted and dragged me at times into new life.
In the same magazine was an article about August Rodin. This felt like a gift from Hope as I was feeling hollow with loss. But this Rodin sculpture gave hope. This gift was that hope, and love could be a future. The sculpture was called The Eternal Spring, although wrongly named in the article. It was vulnerable, voluptuous love. With two bodies arching passionately with pleasure over each other. Their bodies nearly entwined with erotic Joy, and I thought of the Eroticism of the Song of Songs.
Their bodies in similar positions as the injured Vet and the Pieta. Now there was the eternal spring. The woman lay over the man happily erotic in her love making. Like the song of songs, it was crying out,
” Let me kiss you with the kisses of my lips.”
From the death arching of the Pieta to the erotic arch of the life in the eternal spring, yes, hope filled me that new life was possible. I suppose this is what resurrection is about?
Hope from the war nurses. Their experiences handed over to other generations, other nurses, And Rodin over the decades showing that passion never dies. The three statues, made for different purposes over different centuries, had a connection. It was love, beautiful, connected love. And there is a journey to be made. The Journey from the lifelessness of grief to the fullness of love.
For many years I wondered, how do you move from grief to grace? Grace. Grace will bring me home, so the song says and what I wrote in my book in 1987 in Addis Ababa. Grace. I am not even sure what it is, but it is from grief to grace and many on my Emmaus walk are grace for me. Remember, every time you stop and see or stop and listen or stop and carry or stop and laugh or play or give your time, that’s grace. But I know I have been given grace in abundance, and I am able to hold all three sculptures with gratitude for the Graces. Grace is from people who saw me. People who saw my needs and gave grace graciously. Healing me. Slowly healing me. Walking with the gifts given by these three statues, these three nurses Hope, Faith, and Charity.
For all that, I am grateful.
by Sr. Margaret Anne Meyer, MMM USA 02.06.2026
Another visitor to Ngarantoni was Sr. Ursula Sharpe, MMM. We were invited to hear her explanation of how HIV/AIDS developed in Uganda. It was heart breaking to know that so many people were suffering there. They had been through the ravages of war. The border town was practically wiped out. One woman lost all her twenty-one children to AIDS and had thirty-five grandchildren to care for. Sr. Ursula started an outreach team to care for the people who were discharged home to die. She taught us the symptoms and signs, and we began looking for it in Makiungu.
Professional people like teachers were returning to their villages in a much-weakened condition. Some had thrush, Kaposi sarcoma, fungal infections, and/or tuberculosis. There were many articles in the medical journals which we received from time to time. Initially the only way of testing was to take blood samples and send the specimens to Nairobi with the Flying Doctor Service. This could take some months to get the results which were sent by radio tel. Confidentiality? No one around had these radio tels so we felt all right using this method until we obtained our own HIV testing kits. We would the send the positive results for confirmation. This took several months. In the meantime, we had to make decisions as to who would be suitable blood donors. We also realized that there was a 3-month window period that a negative result could contain the virus.
We decided to have a questionnaire form. This was obtained from gathering our findings from the history and clinical examination as to who would be highly suspicious of having the HIV virus. Some of the questions were:-
What is your name, age, sex, and occupation?
Are you married, divorced, single, or widowed?
How many sex partners have you?
Do you have a skin rash, unexplained fever, weight loss, cough, weakness?
We found that women over twenty-five who were not married or who were widowed were at an extremely elevated risk. Men, who were twenty-eight and not married, were truck or taxi drivers, lived near borders or traveled frequently were also at considerable risk. Professional people were also at risk because they could travel and had money for prostitution.
At first, we had five positive cases and as the years followed increasing numbers were discovered. In the beginning we did not know how to counsel them. Fr. Joinet, a Missionary of Africa, told us not to be afraid of talking to them. If we were frightened, how do you think the patient felt? This gave us some encouragement. I remember not being able to tell a man he was HIV positive. He was also suffering from tuberculosis. During his return visit, I asked him if he had heard of AIDS. He told me he had read all the posters in the hospital, and he thought his sickness fitted the description of AIDS. I felt relieved and I think he did, too. Another woman screamed and shouted that she was going to kill herself. I was very worried about her. She returned in a few days. Her husband had left her, and she was returning home to her mother. We had obtained a donation which I asked if it could be used to help people with HIV/AIDS. She was given money and medicines and asked to return. I was soon going on leave and never saw her again. She was at peace with herself. I later learned that women who were faithful to their husbands became extremely upset if they learned they had the virus because in their understanding, only prostitutes got AIDS.
Sr. Noeleen Mooney was a tremendous help in getting the laboratory testing of HIV/AIDS established. There is much more to say but that will be found in another story.
by Jo Wardhaugh Doyle Ireland 30.05.2026
What saved me from my storm and fire was poetry and art. Both modalities which bypass reason and control.
The two great female poets that I love are Mary Oliver and Emily Dickenson.
There insights on life are powerful. Full of power, full of light hope and direction; Yet poets who write as they do I believe have done their journey, struggled with it, and pushed beyond.
It is impossible to write as they do without the searing wound and depth of insight and wisdom.
Mary Oliver shares her wisdom through her own journey of serene darkness. Looking at the amazement of the leaves and clouds in many ways saved Mary Oliver.
A quiet mystic who wanted to be left alone with her words of freedom. Her words liberated her and she passed the torched poems into my soul.
The Journey: I read it and read it and read it till it somehow started to liberate me from my own shackles to begin my own Journey.
Her poetry stops you.
You must stop and hear about the amazing Sun, or the snow geese where you will hold your breath to try and stop time.
Awe and amazement, simplicity counteracting convoluting lives. Yes, poetry was better for me than any doctor at one point.
Poetry has a way of understanding you clearly and in that liberation of understanding you know you are not alone.
That was strength, which was grounding to keep moving forward knowing that someone at some point felt the same.
Surely that is the point.
Emily Dickonson who does not name her poems, had a poem which accompanied me for thirty years. Thirty years to begin to grasp its profundity. Revelation after revelation at a depth of pain so much deeper than most understanding of a fixable ailment. It walks with you and you walk with it. A gift in time but these words along with the journey, carried me, strengthened me balanced me.
Emily Dickenson says.
There is a pain so utter.
It swallows substance up.
Then covers the Abyss with trance.
So memory can step
Around across upon it
As with a swoon
Goes safely where an open eye
Would drop him bone by bone.
That poem has been my journey.
The two poems befitting a complex life yet healthily accompanying growth and freedom, insight, and laughter.
Poetry if we let it sink into our souls are our seeds of life’s transformation.
by Sr. Sheila Campbell, MMM Ireland 27.05.2026
This year’s tensions in the Middle East have us all worried. As well as the fuel crisis, there is also the rising cost of fertilizer – will this affect our food supply in the year to come?
Luckily, MMM has the answer! Rather MMM had the answer back in 1940 in one of our early MMM Magazines, written during the Second World War. Let’s see how relevant it still is today…
“With present food restrictions and rising cast of so many articles, the housewife needs to manage the household expenditure with great care.
Great for this will be the avoidance of all waste, right balance of different classes of food, and the obtaining of the maximum food value from what is used. We now give some general hints.
Use brown bread rather than white, especially for children.
Avoid using too much meat. Cheaper cuts such as brisket and shin of beef, breast of mutton or sheep’s head are as nourishing as the best joints,
Meat can be made to go further by serving other nourishing and cheaper foods with it, such as lentils, dried peas, haricot beans, barley, etc.
Get the maximum of food value from fresh vegetables by steaming or stewing them with meat rather than by boiling them. If boiling them, keep the water for soup.
Waste no bread. Use scraps for puddings and dumplings.”
Well, what do you think? Could we use this advice, or would you like to add more?
by Nadia Ramoutar MMM Communications Coordinator Ireland 23.05.2026
Looking at what is in the news and what is happening with world politics, it can have the effect of becoming almost “normal”. Oh, there were bombs, deaths, threats…and on and on. It is like a soundtrack playing constantly behind the activities of our everyday life. But if we don’t in some way mute the noise of tragedy, we cannot function with the tasks and responsibilities required of us. But, we also don’t want to become robots or machines who don’t care about peace or seeking it, and have resolved ourselves to tragedy.
What are we to do?
Many of us find that prayer, reflection, walks in nature and talking to a trusted person can all be helpful. But even still it is easy to feel helpless. We are faced with challenges that seem greater than any effort we can possibly give.
For me, part of my coping is to look at what I can actually do in the world and how I can make a difference. This has brought me fully committed to issues for global health for girls and women. In particular, I am working hard to promote and educate about the MMM Sisters work in maternal health and pushing an agenda that all women deserve to survive a healthy childbirth experience.
Sadly, in parts of the world, this is not the case. For those who do survive in Sub-Saharan Africa, too many are left with a severe wound in the vaginal area known as an obstetric fistula. We have created a coalition of other people and agencies who also care about this issue called Safe Birth 4 All. Since this is a wound experienced during prolonged labour it can be prevented and also treated. It used to be a major issue in our western world here but for the past 100 years or so it has not been here due to improvements in health care and other quality of life markers for women.
So this May we are hosting a half-day Safe Birth 4 All Conference in Dublin. People can attend online or can join us in person for no cost. Lunch is provided for those who attend in person. I invite you to get educated about this issue which not enough people know about or understand is a social justice and humanitarian issue along with a medical one. It is brutal to the girl and women’s mental, physical, emotional and spiritual health as they are subjected to neglect and abuse as they leak urine and faeces uncontrollably. What a horrible experience!
Our website www.safebirth4all.com has more information and if you email us at safebirth4all@gmail.com we will gladly you sign you up. If you can’t attend continue to please support us in prayer or with donations. This is a war we can win.
by Sr. Sheila Campbell, MMM Ireland 20.05.2026
The extracts below I found in early MMM Magazines. Yes, some of the language is a little dated, but the concept of dealing with shortages and “make do” is all too real as we face the consequences of modern warfare.
“Today I got a parcel I sent to myself from London – I’d forgotten what was in it” writes Sr. Margaret Garnett from Tanzania. “It was a nice surprise to get two writing pads. Paper is in very short supply out here. I have started to tidy up the old files”. Old reports etc. are being retrieved “so that where the back of the page is blank we can use for letters etc.” At a very practical level this is one of the daily dilemmas of a Medical Missionary of Mary.
From a neighbouring mission, also in Northern Tanzania, Sr. Nuala, while on home leave recently, described how the paper shortage affected her by asking us to use our imagination. “Can you imagine yourself before a class of intelligent, highly motivated students who do not even have copybooks in which to write their notes? This is the situation I face daily in the classroom of the School of Nursing in Dareda.”
“With enthusiasm and a sense of mission, Sisters of the international congregation of the Medical Missionaries of Mary set out to bring Christian hope and service filled with empathy. However limitations, shortages and cultural differences have to be faced. The English born, Doctor, Sister Margaret put it this way; “sometimes I really wonder if God called me to be an MMM in order to search for spare parts for land rovers and motor-bicycles in order that our village health work can continue. But I stay put because basically I am at peace, and I believe that God uses these situations of shortages and other difficulties to teach us that the work is His and not ours. The needs are enormous, and we only touch the surface, so despair could set in, and an attitude of ‘what’s the use’? Well, maybe materially it isn’t much use, but it is all in God’s plan and maybe our small contribution can be like the leaven which leavens the whole loaf eventually.”
There is a great surge of interest in genealogy in Ireland at the moment as the first census taken in 1926 after Ireland became a free state or independent republic has just been released. In the first 24 hours there was something like one million hits on the website such is the excitement it has generated! Millie, a cousin of mine on my mother’s side has been working on our own family tree for several years so the additional information from this census will add to her large body of existing knowledge no doubt.by Sr. Margaret Anne Meyer MMM USA 13.05.2026
A sign of new life in Tanzania was the opening of Ngaramtoni House just outside of Arusha town There was ample space for MMMs to be together for assemblies and retreats. Sr. Consolata Rhatigan, Regional Superior at the time, did an exceptionally excellent job, planting flowers around the house and providing a beautiful landscape. One could sit in the garden and have a good look at Mt. Meru in the distance. It seemed to be only a few miles away. I never saw such amazing birds. I especially liked a bird called the green bee-ant eater. The bird had glowing green and brown feathers with a reddish head and yellow throat and was delightful to behold.
We all loved going there.
A good chance for me to go there came in November 1985. Fourteen MMMS from various houses went there on retreat. It was a valuable experience for us all.
When I returned from the retreat to Makiungu we had a new lay doctor. Dr. Judith Galvin was very welcomed and joined in our medical and community life with great enthusiasm. She proved to be a valuable asset to our medical team. She lived in the original convent quarters in the house built for us by the Pallotine Fathers in the early fifties.
Further down the compound, Sr. Margaret O Connor had built staff houses in rows of a 2-unit complex which were wonderfully comfortable.
We also welcomed Joe and Nessa Breen, and their three lovely children, Rebecca, Stephen and Freida, aged six, four and two.
Joe had come to supervise the building of our new outpatient department. The present building was becoming too small for the increasing number of patients who travelled by bus from Singida each day and also coming from other distant towns in various modes of transport including wheelbarrows. The building had also suffered some structural damage during the earthquake which I previously mentioned.
We really enjoyed their family company at our festive celebrations and everyday life. The children were a delight. The next year, the oldest child, Rebecca, made her First Communion in our chapel. She looked radiantly happy and beautiful inn her white dress. She gave us immense joy with her faith in Jesus. Stephen was soon speaking Gaelic and Swahili with the local children. The youngest child was a bundle of joy. A new addition was added to the family before they left for Ireland. Mary Jo was delivered to our new Maternity Hospital on October 24, 1986.
Soon after, our beloved midwifery tutor, Sr. Mary Donato returned to USA and was replaced by Sr. Sheila Devane. She also did amazing work but that is another story.
