Sr Felicia Matola reflects on her lifetime commitment to serving in Africa with Rachel Beard
Rachel Beard
For most people, a guaranteed trip to Africa doesn’t sound very appealing. But when Sr Felicia Matola first started looking at holy congregations to join, that was her most important criteria.
“The thing that really struck me was it said ‘you will definitely go to Africa’,” Sr Felicia says of the only congregation she ever considered, the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa. She first heard of the organisation from a magazine advertisement. “Where with other congregations, it said in their information you could be sent to any of our missions and some of those missions are in the United States, and I wanted to be a foreign missionary. So that’s what really struck me about that order, and so I started writing seriously to them.”
Sr Felicia has been a professed Franciscan Missionary for Africa for 52 years, but she first decided she wanted to be a sister when she was seven and decided on being a missionary when she was just 12. She says her commitment to serving the faith “never wavered”.
“But it was my older sister who had no intention of becoming a sister, she said, ‘well, if I were going to be a sister, I would be either a contemplative or a missionary’,” she says. “And I said, ‘what are those?’ because I remember I was in about sixth grade when she said it. I was about 12, so she explained what a contemplative was and she explained what a missionary was, so I said to myself, ‘I think I’ll become one of those.”
Sisterhood
Although she grew up in the US, Sr Felicia always knew she wanted to serve outside of her home country. She was trained for the sisterhood in America before moving to the congregation’s mother house in Ireland. From there, she moved to Uganda where she worked for 25 years.
“So I was five years in teacher training college, 10 years in Namagunga teaching biology and then I left,” she says. “I decided I would like to do more frontier work so I went north and worked among the Iteso in a place called Usuk where I did pastoral and youth work and women in development. We started a women’s club and we had a little restaurant and a cow project and a library which helped the kids.”
The Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa have been working in five countries in Africa since 1903: Uganda, Kenya, South Sudan, Zimbabwe and Zambia. Sr Felicia feels that constant presence is reassuring for the locals.
“I remember trying to explain to my own family who found it difficult to understand why I was staying on when I could save my own life and leave and then come back when it was safe,” she says. “And I said, ‘it’s very, very difficult to tell people “God is love” and then just get on a plane and leave and then come back when it’s nice and cosy and they have had to go through all the trouble’. So the fact that we stayed made a very deep impression on the people and I think it showed them that we really did care about them and do care about them.”
Sr Felicia recognises that staying in these developing countries during their time of strife “isn’t easy” but she finds it rewarding.
“Any vocation has its ups and downs but I think that if you have faith and you pray and have a relationship with Christ and draw your strength from the Holy Spirit,” she says. “For instance, for me, the other members of community were a great inspiration to me and they gave me the courage and the strength to continue my journey as a religious missionary sister, and I think probably I gave them the courage also when they were in need of strengthening. That’s what we do. That’s what community is all about.”
South Sudan has been an especially difficult country for Sr Felicia and her fellow sisters to work in as the nation has been at war for a very long time. Sr Felicia describes the country’s people as “traumatised”, and she and her sisters have struggled to help them.
“I don’t know how you deal with a whole nation’s trauma,” Sr Felicia says. “It’s really very difficult, and even when our sisters would like to correct people who are South Sudanese, they have to do it very carefully because the people have been oppressed for so long, that they can easily misinterpret a correction as more oppression. So it’s not easy thing to be working there.”
Sr Felicia left Africa in 2007 and has since been working in the congregation leadership team in Ireland. She is currently considering her next steps in the congregation and doesn’t see retirement anywhere in her near future.
“As I’m growing older, I hope that I would become what I proclaim,” she says. “It’s so easy to proclaim the Gospel in word, but to actually live the good news and to be the kind of person that I am called to be as a Franciscan Missionary Sister of Africa. That would be my own personal goal.”
Congregation
Although her current position in the congregation keeps her a long way from Uganda, the people of Africa are always in Sr Felicia’s thoughts.
“This job will take me up to 2019 and then after that, I’d like to go out to Africa again,” Sr Felicia says. “And work among the people there in whatever way my health and my strength and the need is. I certainly would like to go to Africa and live there as long as I can and finish my days there, if possible, among the people I’ve spent most of my life with.”