If you have a question or topic you’d like me to address on the blog, please email me at cheryl@nunsunveiled.com
MARCH 4, 2010
Home, with Stories I Can't Forget
I’ve slept in my own bed two nights since arriving home from Haiti. Minutes after stepping through the door on Tuesday night, I drank cold water, sipped a glass of wine with my husband and took a really long, hot shower. They were simple pleasures, small comforts of life, but aspects that I really missed in Haiti. Looking back now it all seems like a surreal dream, perhaps a nightmare even, where so many people are pleading for help and there’s no easy solution.
I still remember the anger in the eyes of the young man who begged me to give him and his friends money. “We’re starving in this country. You have money. Give it to us.” He wasn’t threatening me per se, but his aggressiveness was threatening. I’d learned this lesson in India a few years ago. You can’t just whip out your wallet and start handing out dollar bills. There are more people who will line up than you have dollar bills in your wallet.
I felt a similar frustration while walking around the National Soccer Stadium as half a dozen little kids trailed me, clutching at my clothes, while educated, well-meaning men circled above them to ask how they could get funds for the make-shift school they are running at the stadium. Had they talked to anyone at the United Nations or made requests through official channels or charities? That takes too long, they said. “We need supplies now. We need benches and books.”
The problem is that other people need food and shelter. A report released this week criticized the United Nations’ humanitarian efforts, saying the organization lacked coordination with local organizations in delivering aid and establishing security. Walk around Port-au-Prince and you don’t need a report to tell you that: Dead bodies in crowded streets, the mass of residents living under sheets and tarps, children climbing mountains of rubble to gather rocks to sleep on.
On the flight from Port-au-Prince to Miami, I sat next to a Haitian-American business man named Gerald who was leaving the country for the first time since the earthquake. He was going to join his wife and children in San Francisco where he’d sent them to stay with relatives after the disaster. One of his warehouses was destroyed in the earthquake and what supplies he had left he’d sold to the UN. He said he’d barely slept in the last six weeks; he’d been working constantly to try to get supplies into the country. The day before he’d had two cargo containers full of flour stolen at the port. One of his truck drivers was kidnapped and later released after the thieves had stolen his truck and all its contents.
“Things are going to get a lot worse before they get better,” Gerald said. “The Haitian people are not patient. They want everything now. A lot of people are getting very desperate.”
When I asked him why he continued to live in Haiti when as an American he could live anywhere, he said: “This is my home. These are my people.” He plans to return in two weeks to continue helping his country rebuild, he said.
I haven’t yet sorted out what this experience meant. I think for a lot of us we have mixed emotions. We want to believe the country will get better, that somehow all the money pumped into the Red Cross and the Bush/Clinton fund and the United Nations will be able to build a better Haiti. But we see that the needs are so great, and we wonder if they can ever be truly met.
Gerald told me that he does have hope. But it’s hard, he said, when so many people have lost everything, including their families, their homes and, in many cases, their limbs.
“What kind of job will someone with an amputated leg be able to get in Haiti?” he asked.
These are the kinds of questions that gnaw at me. When people ask me how my trip was, they want to hear a nicely packaged story about how well the country is rebuilding. When I tell them the real conditions, I see their eyes glaze over. This is more than they can handle.
“Don’t you feel like you did a good deed by going over there?” my neighbor asked.
“No. I didn’t do anything but listen to stories.”
And now I can’t forget them.
MARCH 1, 2010
Under a Full Moon in Haiti
It’s my last night in Haiti and I’m sitting quietly in my tent, feeling the breeze and admiring a full moon hanging over the mountains. It has been an emotionally exhausting day, the end of an equally exhausting week. I spent the day following Gillian Morantz, of Montreal, Quebec, a young doctor charged with overseeing the unaccompanied minors in the Fond Parisien field hospital, a role she takes seriously.
That day Gillian introduced me to Magana, a 16-year-old girl, whose right leg had been amputated below the knee and whose left leg was also injured, but intact. Magana had been working as a domestic in Port-au-Prince and was washing the dinner dishes when the earthquake struck. When she tried to run out the door, a wall fell on her legs. A water tower on top of the apartment had fallen over and Magana was trapped in a rising pool of water and soon would drown.
Two men heard her crying and were able to pry the cement chunks off her legs. That’s when Magana could see the bones in her legs sticking out. Her legs were bleeding and the water had turned red.
The men carried her only so far. From there, desperate to get away from her apartment building, Magana crawled on her back. The ground was still shaking. When she reached a tree, she prayed: “God, I’m going to stay here until you save me.” Eventually someone took her to the street and flagged down a car that drove her to the hospital. There, someone tied cloths around her legs to stop the bleeding. She recalled at one point early on “white doctors” changed her wounds and gave her an IV. After that, she laid in the hospital for four days without any further attention. Patients who had relatives to advocate for them got help, she said. But Magana was alone.
On the fifth day, she was flown to the Italian hospital ship where part of her right leg was amputated. Eventually she was transported to the field hospital in Fond Parisien where Chris Sullivan, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Chicago, put a rod in her left leg to heal the broken bones. Her wounds were healing and she was wheeling herself around camp. She’d even celebrated her 16th birthday in camp. But still she had no family, no one to help take care of her.
Gillian wanted to contact Magana’s family, who live in a country village unaffected by the earthquake, and let them know Magana was alive. Magana is the youngest sibling of eight girls and two boys.
But Magana wasn’t interested.
“They aren’t going to come for me,” she told Gillian. “They don’t care about me.”
“But where are you going to live?” Gillian pleaded.
“I’ll live with you,” Magana said.
Gillian turned away to wipe her eyes. “I wasn’t expecting that one,” she said to me.
It’s not an unfamiliar fantasy. I’d had children in the camp ask me if I could take them home. And it’s not just the Haitians who wish to go America. Many of us wish we could take them with us. One of the nurses introduced me to a 7-year-old girl, Samanthina, and her mother, Evana. “If I could get papers for her, I’d take her home now,” the nurse said. The little girl’s mother said she, too, wishes her daughter could go to America. “I’m afraid for her future,” she said.
Even if the country manages to reconstruct, the options for the children of Haiti are limited. As if to underscore that point, a 14-year-old boy named Michelet later than evening told me that when his doctor returns to America, he’s certain he’ll take him with him. Michelet told me he doesn’t know where his parents are: “They didn’t come out of the house after the earthquake,” he said. “I guess you’d say they are missing.”
FEBRUARY 27, 2010
Ground Zero in Port-au-Prince: Dead Bodies and Desperation
I have lost my voice in Haiti. I can barely speak and end up in coughing fits when I’m with patients. One patient told me today she would pray for me to get better. Humbling…
It’s cloudy tonight and at moments it’s spitting rain. The rain makes me worry about the people I met yesterday in Port-au-Prince living in shanties constructed of pieces of metal, scrapes of paneling, pieces of tarp, shards of cardboard. My driver, Juma, and I walked through the tent cities, constructed much like an old Moorish city with narrow pathways and maze-like twists and turns.
I expected people to shy away, particularly at the tent city across from the Presidential Palace, which only weeks ago was featured nightly on CNN and other media outlets. But the bright lights are gone and the people who live there want the world to see how they are living. One after another, they came up to me begging me to take a look at how they were forced to live: in a damp spot on the ground, often nothing but a sheet to separate them from the next person, a space no bigger than a twin bed that they shared with their children and their relatives.
“We need tents!” each one pleaded. I suppose I looked official with my notepad and my camera. But what can I do? It’s so frustrating. It’s hard to believe that the mass of Haiti is homeless and yet there are no tents to be found. We’ve even run out of tents at the Fond Parisien field hospital where I am documenting the work of doctors, nurses and physical therapists from the University of Chicago.
Haitians are concerned that when the rainy season comes they won’t have any protection from the elements. It starts seriously raining in about six weeks. Some people are worried that they will end up wet and sick if they can’t get a tent or pieces of metal to keep out the rain. Little boys near the city were gathering cement bricks from the rubble of the Ministry of Interior Defense and loading them in buckets. They lay these on the ground to make a foundation, and then they lay their clothes or bedding on top to make a bed. A bed of rocks.
One man, Sylva Louis, 47, was selling moonshine he’d made out of various fruits outside his metal shack. Sylva spoke excellent English and he lifted his shirt to show me the breast-to-bellybutton scar where he said he’d been shot. He killed the other guy in self-defense, he said, but it didn’t matter; he was deported in 2007. He said he spent 37 years in the United States, mostly working as a cook in Miami and New York.
“I cooked for all the best restaurants and five star hotels,” he said, listing names I didn’t recognize.
He said his shack at first was just sheets but slowly he’s been adding scraps of metal. “When we saw that the government wasn’t going to do anything, then we knew we had to make our own shelter.”
He had two car batteries that were rigged up like a generator that ran a fan and a radio. Nearby he had a line running to a street light where someone had tapped into the electricity.
When Sylva learned I was from Chicago he asked me to call an old girlfriend he had there. He had her number memorized. He wanted me to let her know he was still alive.
Afterwards the driver took me to the nearby Holiday Inn Plaza so we could get something to eat. He ordered rice and chicken. I wanted nothing with rice. Probably ever. I ordered the hamburger. There’s a scattering of people, perhaps some journalists. Juma, who drove for CNN and CBS after the earthquake, said the room used to be packed with journalists. Barbara Streisand is singing on the television, people are tapping into the hotel wifi and ordering cokes. People outside tell me they are starving.
There’s a fine mist of dust everywhere in downtown Port-au-Prince. It is as if we are walking in a fog, a fog of cement and asbestos. I imagine it’s something like being at Ground Zero right after the attack on September 11. The air is filmy and thick. By the end of the day, I feel like I’ve inhaled nothing but dust and diesel smog. People walk around wearing masks, some of them medical, many of them rags they’ve twisted around their mouths.
When we first arrived in Port-au-Prince in the morning, Juma took me to the downtown area where most of the devastation occurred. I’d had a brief tour of the area two days earlier. This time, though, we walked the streets, taking in the piles and piles of crumbled and mashed cement, some towering three and four stories. It’s hard to convey in words the impact of such a sight. Gray sewage collected in the streets and the smell was of active decay. Personal items were strewn in the street: someone’s handbag, a shoe.
As we walked, a man came up and grabbed Juma’s arm and said in Creole that they had just found two dead bodies up ahead. He offered to show us. I thought perhaps two bodies had been pulled from the rubble, but soon we came upon UN white jeeps and various military men encircling the bodies of two boys who had been beaten to death. Their pants had been torn down to humiliate them and armies of flies had collected around their multiple wounds.
A Canadian military officer told me that they’d discovered the bodies two hours earlier but they didn’t know what had happened. A Haitian police chimed in: “No one in Haiti sees anything. They are too afraid.”
Somehow I thought that would be the worst thing I would see. But then we went to the National Soccer Stadium where the entire Astroturf is populated with sheet and tarp shanties. Walking into the stadium there is a strong, suffocating order of sewage, and once inside I couldn’t help making the comparison to Hurricane Katrina when so many survivors sought refuge at the stadium, which turned out to be nothing like a refuge. As soon as I stepped down onto the field, half a dozen little kids came up and grabbed my pants, checking my pockets. Despite finding nothing, they held onto me the entire time, petting my arm, seeking attention.
During our foray into the shanty maze, we found entire extended families sitting underneath tarps. Someone would summon us, lift up the tarp to their “home” and there would be half a dozen people or more sitting or lying in the heat. One woman insisted I take a picture of her month-old baby. She was born at the stadium.
When we were about to leave, two boys, one 15 years old and the other 11, came up to me and begged me to take them to the orphanage.
“We have no mother or father. We have no tent.”
FEBRUARY 25, 2010
A View inside a Tent Hospital
I’m in my tent, hoping it doesn’t blow away tonight with the wind. One side has already partially collapsed. In the hills, a Haitian woman is singing what I believe are gospel songs in a squeaky, high-pitch voiced accompanied by a steel guitar. A preacher cuts in occasionally. Most of the time he yells. I wonder what he is saying, if he is happy we are here. His preaching, amplified nightly for all the neighborhood to hear, goes on for hours. We lay in our tents at night waiting for the quiet.
I just had dinner, prepared by Chef Lucky, a Haitian, who prepares 1,000 meals every day with no refrigeration, and until recently, no electric stoves. Breakfast is usually some kind of grits. I avoid this meal and opt for a granola bar. Lunch, served at 2 p.m. is rice sprinkled with a few beans. Every day. Rice and beans. They mound the plate with rice and I always think there’s no way I’m going to eat all that. But I do. It’s the only hot meal we have. Dinner is usually cereal with warm milk. Everything in Haiti is warm. Tonight dinner was warm pudding.
The truth is I feel a little shallow just mentioning my discomforts here. There’s three patients and their families to a tent. The field hospital has run out of tents. A little boy, 11 years old, hobbled into the triage tent tonight and begged to be allowed to sleep in one of the cots in the post-op. He said there were 11 people sleeping in his tent. Dr. Keegan Checkett grimaced and gave him some suckers and told him there wasn’t anywhere else for him to sleep but his tent. He hobbled away on his crutches, looking as if he were about to cry.
The tents are so hot that most patients lay partially naked during the day to stay cool. Those who are ambulatory — and I say ambulatory instead of walk because most of them are not “walking” but in wheelchairs or on crutches or walkers or even have someone carry them — gather under tarps set up for shade or lay on mattresses on the ground under trees. Everyday the hospital absorbs more patients. A nearby hospital in Jimini, Dominican Republic, is closing and sending its patients here. It seems like there aren’t enough doctors and nurses, especially nurses.
Today I followed around the physical therapists and nurses from the University of Chicago Medical Center. The temperature in the tents was so hot that Melanie Plumley, RN, a pediatric emergency nurse, was caring for patients outside. She cut off a man’s cast in the space of 24 inches in between two tents.
“There’s never enough people. There’s always something to do. I can’t do enough,” Melanie said.
The physical therapists Catherine Kennedy and Megan McDonald urged patients to exercise their injured body parts, especially those with stumps whose muscles need to be stretched. Some patients’ fingers have curled under and Dr. Chris Sullivan had to stretch them out. It’s painful and they don’t want to do it.
Then there are the sick in the surrounding community who have heard about the clinic and believe it can work magic. People do practice voodoo here and our medicine is a bit like that to them. A woman with a young baby wandered into the triage asking someone to help her baby who was nearly a year old and couldn’t sit up. The physical therapists and doctors told the mother that they had to stop coddling the baby and let her sit up. The woman insisted on getting medicine for the baby. “Why won’t you help my baby?” she demanded. The staff told her that what the baby needed was for her to let her baby sit up and stand on its own. They showed her simple exercises to do with the baby. But the mother left dissatisfied. “They think we can perform magic,” one of the triage doctors said. The baby appeared “delayed” and may have some mental disabilities.
Another woman came in with her baby who had a rash over most of her body. It was highly malnourished and eventually had to be rushed to a hospital in Port-au-Prince where it could be incubated.
I spent the afternoon wandering between tents. Through a Haitian interpreter I interviewed several people who had their arms and limbs amputated. They told harrowing stories of being dragged into the streets and left for days before anyone would pick them up.
One of the saddest cases was a young mother, Louphine Demorcy, 31, who has three children. She told me that she is a vendor and at 5 p.m. she was getting ready to go home and was talking to three friends when suddenly the place they were standing opened up.
She said she called out: “Jesus, Jesus, help me.” She was thrown into the street where a store wall fell onto her arm and another wall fell onto her leg. She said that most of the people around her were dead. A man on the street saw her and pulled her out of the rubble. It wasn’t until the next day that someone found her and took her to the hospital, but during the three days there she never saw a doctor. Eventually, she was transported by an ambulance to the Dominican Republic where a doctor told her that he would have to amputate most of her arm and leg because they were affected.
“I didn’t have a hope after I lost my arm and leg,” she said. “Then I told myself that most people died and Jesus is going to help me.”
Louphine said she does not feel fortunate to have survived, but she feels that it by the grace of God she is alive.
What is apparent from meeting these people is how much of their emotional wounds will have to be addressed in the future. “This is going to be a stump generation,” Melanie told me. “A generation who don’t have arms, legs, whole limbs, fingers.”
FEBRUARY 24, 2010
A Day in Port-au-Prince
I just returned from a day in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. Almost any adjective I would give this devastated city would sound trite and overused at this point. And now I sit here in our field hospital listening to people who have amputated arms and legs sing gospel songs.
This is a country of paradox. I found people living in tents pitched on the street because there wasn’t even room on their property to set up a tarp, and they are afraid of more tremors toppling what’s left onto them. And yet they were going about their life as best they could — playing scrabble on a table set up beside their tent. Tall buildings were turned to rubble while other buildings next door remained untouched.
(I apologize in advance: I’m weak and have a sore throat and flu-like symptoms. So if this post is incoherent, that’s why.)
It is true that as we drove into wealthier neighborhoods, places with older estates not unlike mansions in Kenwood, there were fewer ruins. Entire blocks, neighborhoods were spared. Then a turn down the street revealed a block of rubble, residents living under tarps strung up in the street.
I tagged along with the director of the University of Chicago’s mission, Christian Theodosius, MD, MPH. The purpose of our visit wasn’t to ogle the destruction but to seek approval from the Haiti Health Minister for the Medical Center’s application for a $5 million grant from the United Nations that would keep our field hospital in Fond Parisien running for a year. We just learned that we tentatively have been approved.
The field hospital is about 15 miles outside of Port-au-Prince and is the largest field hospital in all of Haiti. It is a unique collaboration between Harvard University, the University of Chicago and other medical institutions and some NGOs, like Operation Smile. After much waiting outside what could only be called a stone castle built into the hillside — with homeless Haitians living in tents on the front lawn — we were granted a meeting with the attaché to the minister who gave us his conditional approval.
Christian was ecstatic, but our high spirits were tempered when we drove through the most devastated areas, including the downtown where the Presidential Palace —essentially the equivalent of the U.S. White House — was toppled by the earthquake and a settlement of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of tarp shanties and makeshift tents sprouted up on the grass outside the Palace. It would be the equivalent of a tent city on our National Mall. The Supreme Court, a towering structure architecturally similar to our Supreme Court, also had imploded. Still across from the demolished Presidential Palace and in front of his shack home, a child was flying a “kite” made out of a garbage bag, sticks and scrap string.
What I didn’t see much of was physically injured people. A few Haitians hobbled around on crutches, but there was nothing like the number of amputees or survivors with external fixators like we have in our field hospital. Amazingly, our patients maneuver their wheelchairs over gravel to get to the bathroom. Even children with complicated pins and metal rods coming out of their legs and arms saunter through the dirt and dead grass on crutches and walkers.
The most surprising finding was how “normal” some parts of the city seemed to be operating. Venders set up their wares on the street like any other day — offering aavegetables, water, live chickens, car parts — next to piles of rubble on the street. Perhaps the most vivid image today was a man whose barber shop was completely filled with gravel, yet he was digging it out, one shovel at a time.
FEBRUARY 22, 2010
Finally, in Haiti
I'm writing from a small tent in Haiti near the border of the Dominican Republic. Our team of nine from the University of Chicago Medical Center left Santo Domingo this morning a little before 10 a.m. in a small bus carrying 20 bags of medical supplies. Two hours later, we were stopped at the town of Jaquimeyes, about two hours from the border of Haiti. Villagers had lain tree limbs over the road and set them on fire. Little boys on scooters were tooling around setting off firecrackers and a long line of traffic came to a standstill, unable to pass. Apparently the entire town had issued the strike in hopes that by interrupting traffic on a major road to Haiti so that they could get the attention of the government to fix their road.
When our mission leader, Chrissy Babcock, MD, negotiated with some of the strike leaders, they seemed accommodating, but then other drivers were angry that we seemed to were being given preferential treatment. At one point some boys offered to take us on a back road around town, but our driver abandoned that plan almost immediately feeling unsure where the boys might take us.
After an hour of waiting and much back and forth, our bus turned around and we drove the back roads, which were rough and unpaved in many places, until we were able to get back on the main path. We passed through the border about 5 p.m. and eventually arrived at the Love a Child orphanage in Fond Parisien. The founders of the orphanage have been at the camp since 1971. It is an evangelical Christian mission. The owners were kind enough to move their school of 600 so that the field hospital could be set up on their property.
The tents from the crew we are replacing were missing, so Babcock and assistant camp leader Christian Theodosius, MD, MPH, had to have a crew of camp workers set up four more tents for us. After we were finally set up in our tents, we got our first lesson in how to eat an MRE (Meals Ready to Eat). They come in pouches with a packet that when you add water heats up the main meal in tinfoil. My meal was chicken and dumplings and I have to say it wasn’t bad. Others had enchiladas and pasta. We ate in the dark, sitting on the ground or on red buckets that we were given to wash in.
Divided in nine sections, the tent hospital is organized so that the most vulnerable patients are closest to the main area of camp. Patients walk with walkers or wheelchairs over course and dry ground. There’s a triage where several pregnant patients are tonight.
The area is really stunningly beautiful. The forested mountains surround us and a lake is nearby. When we passed the border into Haiti, water from the lake lapped at the road. Apparently it has been rising in recent years and is slowly eroding everything in its path. Soon there will be no more border crossing at Jimini.
At the camp, new bathrooms have been set up to segregate the men from the women. There are still no doors on the bathroom. In fear of the rats, I’ve surrounded the interior of our tent with moth balls. My tent buddy is Karen Arndt, RN, has worked at the Medical Center for nearly 24 years, mostly on the helicopter transport teams. She’s a real trooper. We tied up our food to the roof so the rats and the ants can’t get to them.
FEBRUARY 20, 2010
GOING TO HAITI!
On Wednesday afternoon, I finally got the word that the University of Chicago Medical Center, where I work, was definitely sending a team to Haiti this weekend. It's been a scramble, but I got my shots, am taking my anti-malaria pills and am about to get on a plane. It will take two days to arrive in Fond Parisien where our medical team has set up a tent hospital along with some other U.S. teaching hospitals.
I got to say, I'm a little nervous.
Sure, I've traveled a great deal in my life — Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Russia, Turkey, Mongolia, Siberia, China, India — but Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. The stories I'm hearing from those who have come back have been inspiring on one level and frightening on another. One of our pharmacists who just returned from setting up the first pharmacist in Haiti at the tent hospital told me to be careful of the rats at night scurrying around the tents. I'm told to take fly paper to attract the hordes of mosquitoes and flies. They say there are bugs as big as your hand...I'm also told to not expect to take a shower while I'm there and to get over the need for any privacy since there's no such thing as a real bathroom. I'm also told I should pack some alcohol— it makes the nights go easier.
Despite those anxieties, which compared to the Haititans' tragedies seems petty actually, I'm very excited about going and documenting what our doctors and nurses are doing in Haiti. This is really important work and at time when medical care is crucial as Haiti begins its wet season when malaria is the most dangerous.
So, I hope you'll follow my journey here and the journeys of the Haitian people whom I encounter. I also plan to post extensive photos at my Chicago Now blog site. My blog is called "A Chicagoan in Haiti."
FEBRUARY 13, 2010
New Edition Arrives!This week I received my early copy of Unveiled, the new second edition with the new cover. It looks beautiful!
(The new edition is in the center of the photo and the hardcover is on the left and the paperback is on the right).
I think the cover conveys a more modern image of nuns as women. The designer did a wonderful job as did my editor at Penguin, Denise Silvestro, in selecting review quotes and blurbs. In this time of uncertainty in the publishing industry, I’m really grateful that my book still lives and that there are so many readers curious about the hidden life.
Someone asked me this week how many years I had worked on the book and I was stunned to realize that I’m going into my 13th year since I began my initial research. As the first chapter of Unveiled reveals, I was looking forward to a St. Patrick’s Day party at the house of my good friend Margaret Nelson, a woman who holds dual passports from Ireland and the United States, when a sister from St. Benedict’s in Joseph, Minnesota called me and asked if I’d like to join them for the weekend.
That was March 17, 1998.
And here I am 12 years later still talking and writing about sisters and how much they have affected my life. It’s been a wonderful journey. I’m looking forward to celebrating the new edition launch and soon I’ll be posting reading dates around Chicago where I hope to see some of you. And if you have an idea for an event, or if your book group would like to have me come talk, please send me an email. And don’t forget the book goes on sale March 2!
FEBRUARY 7, 2010
Super Bowl Sunday: Nuns pick winners
It’s that time of the year when football fans who don’t have much faith in anything — let alone religion — turn to nuns who have a propensity to pick winners. In Chicago, we have our own local celebrity nun, Sister Jean Kenny, also called the “Psychic Nun,” who every year picks the winner of football’s biggest game. This year, Sister Jean, a former arts and gym teacher at a now-closed elementary school on the Northwest Side, is predicting a Colts win over the Saints, 31 to 22.
Sister Jean is a media darling and has appeared on CNN, as well as, Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien. What sets Sister Jean apart is that she issues her prediction in rhyme and verse. She also has correctly predicted the winner of the Super Bowl 18 times in the last 24 years. A Providence Sister from the Sisters of Providence of Saint Mary-of-the-Woods in Indiana, Kenny is normally with the saints, she says. The foundress of her order, St. Mother Theodora Guerin, was the eighth American saint. But this year, Sister Kenny writes in her poem that “the saddened Saints fall from grace and are sore and lame.”
Sister Kenny’s tradition of picking the Super Bowl winners started in 1986 when the Bears were playing. Sister Kenny entered a poem-writing contest for a Chicago radio station. Then she wrote a poem about Bears’ player William “The Refrigerator” Perry that made her one of the contest winners.
This year’s poem is entitled “Manning’s Miami Masterpiece.”
Welcome back fans to the Sunshine State,
see the galloping Colts sprint out of the gate;
Sean Payton’s “Who Dat” team is dealt their bridesmaid fate,
while the BLUE Dat
winners go on to celebrate.The penalty prone Saints are confused and slow,
Drew Brees experiences a knock-out blow.
Gentleman Jim Irsay’s team is focused and ready to go.
Coach Caldwell’s game plan unfolds well at the NFL’s biggest show.Freeney shows “Hoosier Hospitality” as he inflicts some pain.
The saddened Saints fall from grace and are sore and lame.
They played hard but could not live up to their name.
The Colts Stampede In Miami again and win the big game!
Sister Kenny isn’t the only nun who predicts the winners. Sister Martha Carpenter, a die-hard Green Bay Packers fan, also predicts the big game winners. Sister Martha runs St. Peter’s Indian Mission School south of Phoenix, Arizona (Chapter Nine of Unveiled) and is frequently featured on the Fox affiliate in Phoenix predicting the winners of various games.
Sister Martha’s office is covered with Green Bay Packer and Phoenix Cardinals pennants, decals and signed photographs of football players. Football is not a matter of life and death: It’s much more important, touted a bumper sticker tacked to her wall.
“I’m a born cheese head, but a born-again Cardinals fan,” Martha told me as she placed her Packers cheese wedge over her veil.Martha, whose conversations are peppered with arcane sports dates and history, grew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin, within walking distance of Lambeau Field. Her mother’s three brothers played for the Packers, an NFL record, Martha proudly noted.
A Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity, Martha’s order is based in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. They are an order composed of teachers who run Catholic schools in the northern Midwest and the Southwest. Martha has spent her entire teaching career on Indian missions in Wisconsin and Arizona.
Her work at the desert school attracted Cardinal owner Bill Bidwill who has donated much time and money to the school. Martha attends games with Bidwill and has led prayers for a few team events. At one point, her sports dedication garnered the attention of a Fox network producer who asked Martha to predict the winners of several football games one weekend. When she got most of them right, the producer offered her a full-time gig, but Martha declined.
Still, nearly every Super Bowl Sister Martha is asked to make a prediction. Last year, she erroneously predicted the Cardinals would win. Let’s hope Sister Jean has better luck this year.
JANUARY 31, 2010
Peace Corps, Sisters' Corps: Engaging in Social Justice in our Everyday Lives is Tough
This week I volunteered to go to Haiti. Several doctors and nurses from my hospital were going and I offered to accompany them and document, in words and pictures, their care of injured Haitians. So far, they haven’t taken me up on my offer. It’s too dangerous, they said. Having worked as a journalist for two decades — a job that often placed me in harm’s way covering prisoners, gangs, prostitutes, serial murderers — I found their answer a bit conservative.
Since leaving daily journalism exactly two years ago, I’ve struggled with feeling that my daily work isn’t exactly fulfilling a higher good. True, as an editor and writer, I’m trumpeting scientific and medical breakthroughs that save lives, but those efforts pale in comparison to the doctors who are actually saving the lives. The stories I write and edit these days are longer and more complex than just about anything I did at the newspaper. That’s one of the drawbacks of daily journalism: It has to be short, to the point and often simplistic.
I don’t miss much about newspapers these days. The stories are even shorter and most of the ink goes to covering prosaic politics and the lives of celebrities. What I do miss about my former ink-stained days is the social justice component that working at a daily newspaper offered. Much of what I did as a reporter was uncovering stories of people wronged and needing a champion for their cause. I admit I’m a sucker for the underdog.
This week when I thought about going to Haiti, it reawakened that activism drive within me. I was excited by the prospect of being in the thick of helping people, being a witness to lives changed. The truth is it’s hard to feel that every day we’re making the world a better place, helping people who don’t have advocates, who don’t have power. It’s the aspect that’s hardest to achieve in our daily lives.
My assistant editor, a young woman who has traveled throughout many third world countries, told me she often feels she should apologize for having joined the Peace Corps. People tell her she was naïve for having taken off a couple of years to go hang out in poor countries. I was stunned that anyone would make her feel anything but proud for having responded to the needs of others.
I never joined the Peace Corps. I always toyed with the idea. I had a husband and kids. In a way, I felt traveling the country and hanging out with sisters who were active in caring for the poor, homeless, the undocumented, taught me the value of giving, taught me the deep rewards for having lived among those who don’t have so much. When you are in constant contact with people who have so little, who don’t know how they are going to eat or where they are going to sleep, it puts your own meager troubles in perspective.
That's how Lupe made me feel. I'd only just arrived at the Franciscan Sisters' birthing clinic on the border of Texas and Mexico, when the sisters paired me up with Lupe. She didn't speak English and I didn't speak Spanish. But I held her hand for nearly 24 hours until she bore her seventh child. Knowing Lupe made me feel humble. She lived in a shack that leaked when it rained. She had no running water or toilet. But she survived. Somehow, I had far fewer needs when I was hanging out with the sisters than I do now and I make a lot more money now.
I miss those adventures in my normal life. I miss seeing and experiencing all the ministries of the sisters, even if they were simply protesting or delivering bread or holding the hand of a young woman giving birth. Nuns have a rich and vibrant life and I feel fortunate for having lived vicariously through them, if only for a few years. In a way, I was in the Sisters Corps.
JANUARY 24, 2010
Wanted: Seven women, between the ages of 20 and 40 who want to spend the rest of their lives at church camp — or something like it.
Today a unique monastery set in innercity Minneapolis is launching a campaign to double its size. With seven sisters, the monastery wants to attract seven more sisters in the next three years. The women are specifically targeting young women between the ages of 20 and 40 years old. This monastery has garnered a great deal of outside interest over the years as it experimented with various kind of monastic commitments, including allowing married couples and single men and women to live among the sisters but without taking the same vows.
This time, though, the sisters are looking for women who want to sign up for the rest of their lives.
The Visitation Monastery (Chapter Two of Unveiled) has always been one of my favorite places. Their monastery feels a lot like church camp to me: lots of praying and singing, informal meals, group activities, trips, impromptu get-togethers, assorted people dropping by, ice cream and sprinklers out back in the summer and late-night giggling. Though the sisters are contemplative and place a high value on prayer, they live in two old houses in a poor section of town and intertwine their lives with those of the community.
When they first moved in twenty years ago, the Visitation Sisters thought they would simply be "a presence" in the midst of the chaotic atmosphere of an underserved part of town. But the sisters quickly learned that weaving their lives with their neighbors would require more. A drug dealer was shot dead outside their back stairs and Sister Katherine Mullin held the man in her arms during his last few minutes on earth. Over the past two decades, the sisters have become an integral part of the neighborhood, hosting play times for kids and taking them to camp, providing counseling to adults and becoming advocates for those who often don't have a voice.
"Our ministry of presence on the North Side is boundless," said Sister Katherine (shown in the photo above with some of the neighborhood kids.) "We want to expand our monastery so more sisters can be there for our neighbors."
One night while I stayed with Visitation sisters, Sister Katherine and I sat up late drinking beer and eating popcorn. Yeah, even sisters drink beer. That's what I thought was so wonderful about these sisters. They might be singing and praying at all hours of the day and anyone could walk in and join them.
So, today, the feast day of the Visitation Order founder St. Francis de Sales, the sisters kick off their campaign. As part of that outreach, the sisters have created a new Web site. They plan to target churches and young adult groups. They'll host discernment evenings to help women figure out if their special kind of life is of interest. The sisters also say they'll be making a public relations push, using advertising and blogging and social media. Like I said, this is a group of women with modern ideas.
Check out their Web site at www.visitationmonasteryminneapolis.org and by all means, if you know a young woman who hasn't quite found the right community, tell her about these sisters. If I wasn't married, this might be the place I'd join...
JANUARY 16, 2010
What would you do if you’d worked 50 years and then realized the culmination of your cause wasn’t going to happen in your lifetime? Like most people, you’d probably give up or, at the very least, become discouraged.
But Sister Linda Kulzer, a Benedictine from St. Joseph, Minnesota, refuses to quit. At 80 years old, she has been a witness for nearly half a century to the women’s movement within the Catholic Church, specifically the push to ordain women as priests.
“I was in my early thirties when Vatican II (1962 – 1965) took place,” she said. “Almost right away we saw the great strides that were being made by women in the church — being lectors and Eucharistic ministers. Occasionally women were being asked to preach. Young girls were able to be altar servers. We began to believe that ordination for women was not far off.”
On Thanksgiving, 1975, Sister Linda and 1,200 other sisters and several bishops gathered in Detroit for the first Women’s Ordination Conference. About 125 women indicated they wanted to become priests. When she returned home, a priest from the nearby Abbey inquired about the conference and when Linda explained what had happened, he seemed impressed. Then he asked her when she thought the Church would allow women to be ordained. “I told him by 1990.”
Well, it’s 20 years later and Sister Linda is still waiting.
There have been multiple setbacks along the way; the biggest was in 1994 when a papal edict forbade Catholics from even discussing women’s ordination.
“Can you imagine telling the people of God that they are forbidden to even discuss a matter of doctrine?” Sister Linda said. “This order was impossible to obey — it was like asking a person to stop thinking.”
Gradually it began to dawn on Sister Linda and others that there was little likelihood that the Catholic hierarchy or the Pope had any intention of ordaining women. That’s when women decided they would have to ordain themselves, without authorization from the Church. On June 29, 2002, seven women were ordained by a bishop from Argentina on the banks of Danube River. Within weeks, all seven women were excommunicated by the Church.
Since then at least 10 more ordination ceremonies have taken place. At least 25 women from the U.S. and Canada have been ordained as priests and 12 to 14 have been ordained as deacons. None of these women have been excommunicated. Sister Linda and others see this as real progress.
You might wonder why ordaining women is so important. I think you have to realize that many Protestant churches allow — albeit encourage — women to be ordained. The Orthodox Church has always allowed married priests to be ordained. In this day and age, it just seems sexist to insist that men lead. There’s a huge priest shortage and 65 percent of the laity say they would like to see women become priests (something like 75 percent believe priests should be allowed to marry.)
When people try to justify institutionalized prejudice against women under the auspices of “religion,” I always argue that if church law declared only a white man could be ordained, would there be any argument that the rule was obviously passed during a time of certain cultural oppression and shouldn’t be upheld?
In 2006, Sister Linda attended an ordination of women. “It was an unusually profound experience for me,” she said. When she saw a woman she knew standing in full chasuble and priestly robes begin the Mass, Sister Linda began to weep.
“I had likely attended at least 18,000 Masses in my lifetime,” Sister Linda said. “Every one of those 18,000 Masses in the past was presided over by a man.”
I always thought it strange after spending days in a monastery without seeing a man to then walk into the chapel and have a man presiding at the altar. It seemed so unfair that the sisters had managed to form a community all of their own, outside the Church, supporting themselves, and yet they still were required to have a man come in to lead Mass, the most important ritual of their spiritual lives.
Sister Linda says she is heartened by these recent rebel ordinations. I’m inspired by Sister’s Linda’s tenacity. I don’t think it’s likely that the Catholic Church will reverse course soon. But these women are doing what the early female saints did: listening to their faith, even at great cost.
JANUARY 10, 2010
I was saddened this week when I learned that a former colleague of mine and another colleague of my husband's were both laid off at newspapers in Minnesota. It’s a tough time for everyone, especially those in the media. Over the last two years, I've watched many talented journalists laid off from jobs in which they treated more like a vocation. Sadly, it’s the tragedies of others that often remind us how grateful we are of our own circumstances.
At the same time, some good news has come out of a monastery in Minnesota. I heard from one of my dear Benedictine friends this week, a sister who is eighty years old and still passionate about her beliefs. An author, the sister is active in the movement to ordain women in the Catholic Church. She sent me a talk she gave recently about the modern movement to ordain women priests in the Church. (Perhaps in a later blog, with her permission, I can talk more in-depth about her convictions.) She has been active in the Women's Ordination Conference since its inception in 1974, and yet she hasn't given up, despite the strong papal reaction. (In 1994, a papal edict forbade Catholics from discussing women's ordination.) My friend's steadfast belief and determination inspires me. She's truly a gutsy woman and we could all learn a great deal from women like her who are willling to stake everything on their beliefs.
Speaking of strong women, I heard from a couple of HBO documentary filmmakers who are searching for young women currently discerning whether they should become sisters. There's something compelling about religious life when contemporary media are intrigued by mysteries of the call. These young filmmakers — one whose own mother was a nun — are determined to show the interior struggle that a woman must go through before she commits to an order. If you know of such a woman or an order that is attracting such young women — I've mentioned several in my book including the Franciscan Sisters of the Martyrs of St. George in Alton, Illinois —feel free to send me an email.
This week we've had two feet of snow at the farmhouse. Greg and I arrived Saturday morning to a driveway that was up to our waists in snow. I personally find the snow incredibly beautiful, especially the quiet as it blankets the woods and the ground. It's truly breath-taking.
JANUARY 2, 2010
It's the winter's first major snow storm at our farmhouse in Indiana. We already have about a foot of snow and meteorologists have promised another. The snow is blowing sideways and I'm snuggled up in my studio. A roaring fire is burning in the wood stove and snow is blowing around outside.
I find that this is a good time of year to retreat and consider the year past and the year ahead, what I hope to achieve and how I failed to succeed at certain goals in the previous year. My resolutions are not rules, per se, but I view them as guidelines as to what I hope to accomplish in the new year. Some resolutions appear every year — exercise more, read more books, write more — but sometimes it's just a formal way of reminding myself what my life's mission statement is for the coming year.
The nuns call this discernment, a period when a person seriously reflects on a decision, praying and meditating about that decision before committing. Others might simply call it a time of reflection. Whatever you call it, I hope you make space to listen to your inner voices that tell you what's most important. And I wish you all success and happiness in this new year.
DECEMBER 22, 2009
Welcome to my new blog at nunsunveiled.com. I imagine this space as a vehicle for me to gather my thoughts about writing, religion, women’s issues and larger philosophical questions. This is not a blog limited to a discussion about nuns or sisters or religious women, but I’m hoping to use those subjects as jumping off points for further discussions and ruminations. Suffice it to say, if you are interested in the book Unveiled and the topics explored within — feminism, women’s religious orders, the search for a meaningful life, community, faith, peace, fighting for social justices, writing, meditation, having a voice, etc. — then you should be interested in the topics I explore here.
For starters, let me explain why we have revamped the Unveiled Web site. After years of continued interest in the book, the publisher, Berkley at Penguin/Putnam, decided to reissue the book in a new format this coming spring. Over the years, interest in nuns has come from varying and disparate audiences and there seems to be no shortage of interest from the media, either. Just this fall, I have been contacted by writers and producers from National Public Radio and the Wall Street Journal and film makers who routinely produces documentaries/movies for HBO.
I know what it’s like to be in those writers and producers shoes. When I first became interested in learning more and writing about religious sisters, I scoured libraries and the Internet for books that would help my research about contemporary religious women. I found virtually none. Most were historical texts. There were a few from established authors, but those were also historical in nature and usually only delved into the lives of one order. I was interested in the vast dichotomy of the orders I was beginning to experience.
That’s why, ten years after I first began my pursuit into women’s religious orders, Unveiled remains a relevant and informative narrative about today’s Catholic nuns and sisters. The research spanned more than five years and included interviews with more than 300 sisters from 50 different religious orders. I continue to hear from many of the women in the book. Some have died, others have chosen not to remain in a religious order, most continue to their lives just as committed as when I first interviewed them. This blog, perhaps, can update and supplement the stories and narratives contained in the book.
For now, I’m hard at work writing a novel that has nothing to do with religious sisters. But those topics that inspired me to travel inside the unknown territories of religious communities still inspire me to think about all the mentioned issues. I hope to continue to explore those topics here and I hope you’ll join me. Feel free to send me messages at cheryl@nunsunveiled.com or offer topics of discussion. With your permission, I’ll post those who care to share their own views.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.
- Cheryl
