Sally Roddy with her family Personal Profile
“What keeps me going is just a strong faith and belief that this is what Christianity is about,” says Sally Roddy, long-time member and current President of Viatores Christi (VC).
She has spent years working on staff and volunteering with VC, the lay missionary group who this year are celebrating their 60th. She is now retired and works in her present role in a voluntary capacity.
Sally had always known she wanted to be a missionary as long as she can remember. She had an aunt who was one of the Medical Mission Sisters (MMS) and worked in Nigeria.
“It was part of our Christmas outings that we went to the Mansion House. We met our aunt and all the other medical missionaries. I got quite fascinated, they used to show slideshows of their work and Africa and that really captivated me.”
Her interest was also spiked when VC visited St Louis in Rathmines where she was in school at the time. “It was around 1965, but I remember keeping it in the back of my mind that you can be a missionary and you dint have to be a nun. I wasn’t sure that id make a great nun really even then.”
When she left school Sally went to work in the civil service for five years and there she met VC at a careers day. While working for the Department of Agriculture and then Education.
She completed her degree and higher diploma at night in University College Dublin and then worked as a teacher for year before eventually going to Thailand with VC.
“I went on the training course in early 1972. In about two more years that will be 50 years ago.” She says the nine month course was inspiring and full of insightful discussion. “It really opened up so many new areas of development, justice and personal development, and responsibility for the world.
“It was just after Vatican II and the whole idea of the Church being for the world and the Church being the people of God, we were very much on fire with all that stuff at that time.”
She then went to Thailand so spent four years there in the 70s. She taught English in a school run by a French missionary order as well as doing pastoral and community work.
When she came back she got involved in the organising team in VC, then in 1980 she was taken on as staff to work in promotions. “Those were the years when we had the most people working overseas, it was normal enough to have 50 or 80 people at a training course.” The numbers are not as strong now “mission nowadays is a difficult one because young people are not as involved in things to do with the church.”
During the three years she worked for VC she met Colm Roddy who was a trainee there. They got married at the end of 1981.
“In mid 1983 we went to work in Ethiopia as a couple,” she says. That was where they adopted their first daughter.
Colm was an engineer and Sally worked there in community development and pastoral work for four years on a mission made of a group of congregations including the Spiritans, the Missionaries of Mary and Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa in a Provence which was about the size of Ireland and had very few roads.
“It was called Gamo Gofa and we lived and worked in a place called Arba Minch, which means 40 springs,” said Sally, they were located between two lakes one of which was home to crocodiles and hippopotamuses.
They met Elsa in the local hospital “She wasn’t exactly abandoned but her mum had died and her father wasn’t in a position look after her so she ended up with her granny, then she was malnourished and in the local hospital,” says Sally.
“Elsa is now a real Irish woman, she’s 35 and she works at the food cloud hub. She did a degree in international development in Maynooth.”
In the mid 90s Sally and Colm returned to Ethiopia, this time to Tigray which had been badly hit by the famine in the 80s.
“We worked there with the Jesuit relief service, while we were there we adopted two more children. They’re brother and sister and their parents has died.” (All pictured in Ethiopia in 1995) Their names were Mel, who has recently opened an Ethiopian supper club and Susie, who is now a nurse in Tallaght Hospital.
“Now they’re worrying about their aging parents, the roles are somewhat reversed,” says Sally.
Being a lay missionary had a huge impact on Sally’s life and she says she is very passionate about lay people being involved in mission work.
“I feel that I was equally on a mission when I worked with the organisation here at home because our idea was to bring back what we had learned and try to bring it to other people and give them the opportunity to go to work overseas. But also to get involved in important social justice and global justice issues at home because we always believed as an organisation that mission was everywhere, not only far away in Africa,” she says.
“I think nowadays people are recognising that there is a lot of missionary work to be done here at home as well, and development work and outreach to people who are marginalised and poor and oppressed.”