by Sr. Margaret Anne Meyer MMM                      USA                        21.05.2025

In 1975, Sr. Dolorosa and I went for a holiday in Turkana, Kenya.  A gentleman farmer took us there in his plane.  We stopped in Kipsaraman and spent the night with Sr. Kathleen Crowley.  The priest, Father Michael Gannon, SPS asked me to stay longer as Kathleen was alone at the time.  That was the last I ever saw of him because the next morning he and the medical assistant crossed a small stream which suddenly became a wild gushing river in which about 10 people drowned.  They were on their way to play football at a neighboring Mission.  We went up in the plane to try and look for Father Michael’s body, but it was never found.  Everyone was heartbroken.  It was a sad day, indeed!

In 1977, the Bishop asked me to leave Uganda for six weeks.  The US Congress had stopped the coffee trade, and he feared there would be retaliation on the Americans.  I went to Kitale for Christmas and it felt like the flight into Egypt.  loved working in Uganda, and it looked like I would have to leave.  Sr. Peter Channel provided a marvelous Christmas dinner which we enjoyed with the St. Patrick’s Fathers.  I also went to Nairobi and helped Sr. Briege Breslin prepare Sr. Andre Brow to take a PAN AM flight to NY.  Sr. Andre was extremely ill at the time.  We were lucky to get some small containers of yogurt for her to take on the plane.

After returning to Kitovu, the American Government asked me to leave.  I did not want to go but we had a community meeting and every Sister present told me to listen to the Bishop and not worry him more.  A priest had been put in prison for two days without food or water and then deported.  He did not want that to happen to me.

I left mid Feb 1978 to go to Tanzania.  Again, I spent some days in Nairobi trying to get into Tanzania by plane, by way of Ethiopia.  The Kenyan border with Tanzania was closed which made travel by road impossible.  Sr. Fergal was very good to me at that time.  She bought my plane ticket and stayed with me in the Flora Hostel.

Father Leo Bourke, a Blessed Sacrament Father, and brother of Brother John, had been sent out of Uganda and was then working at a Mission in Kenya.  He came to see me in the Flora Hostel and invited me to go out shopping with him and have a meal at a Chinese restaurant.  He also took me to see the grave of Edel Quinn.  It was the last time I saw him alive.  He died in 1982 at KCMC from chloroquin resistant malaria.  I attended his funeral at Mtu wa Mbu in Tanzania.  I asked the bishop if I could put a piece of bark cloth in his casket.  I put in the best piece I had in his casket.  It is a Ugandan custom to be buried with bark cloth.  I cried very much for him.  He was only 55 and looked like an angel in the coffin.  He had visited Mom once when she was teaching in Elmont, NY.  Father Leo gave her a rosary which Mom used for many years.  I took it after she died to have as a remembrance for them both.  Now it is so used and broken it remains in a little bark cloth purse to be buried with me when I die.

When the war broke out in 1979, we used to listen to the BBC in Dareda to hear the progress.  The Sisters wrote that during the bombings they would sleep altogether in the big storeroom off the guest bedroom.  Rex, the dog would snuggle around Sr. Catherine Nakintu.  Sr. Aengus Campion hid under the altar in the chapel.  One day a shell went seven feet into the ground a few minutes after Sr. Brigid Keogh went through the garden to the hospital.  It took me a long time to settle in Tanzania but when I journaled, it seemed I was spared all this because I could have trailed behind Sr. Brigid and have been hit by that shell.  Who knows?  I thank God for the twelve happy years that I spent in Masaka.