Mags GarganMags Gargan speaks to a missionary sister about her work in Malawi
“Where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die.
Three to a bed Sister Anne, she said
Dignity passes by.”
Bono wrote those lyrics for the U2 song Crumbs from your Table after meeting Sr Anne Carr MMM in Malawi in 2002. At the time, Sr Anne was running a school training hospital chaplains and she gave the singer a tour of the local hospital, which was running at 300% capacity, offering care to a lot of HIV patients.
“Bono was on his way to a meeting for African leaders and he asked to see the hospital. We had 1,000 beds but were running at 300% occupancy, with two in beds and one sleeping on the floor,” she says.
“Bono was wonderful. I introduced him as my nephew because you couldn’t bring strangers into the hospital. He shook hands with everybody and wondered how I could identify patients with AIDS as a lot were HIV positive at that time. He was very gracious to them and gave us financial support after that,” she says.
Some weeks later, Sr Anne was surprised to receive the U2 CD How to dismantle an Atomic Bomb in the post with a letter which read – “Bono wanted you to have this”. Too busy to listen to the album at first, it was only when a friend pointed out the song to her that she realised she was mentioned in it.
“The lyrics ‘where you live should not decide whether you live or whether you die’, I think that captured what it meant to him,” she says.
Malawi
Sr Anne spent over 30 years working in Malawi. She describes herself as being partly from Dublin and Cork, but it was growing up in Cork that she first decided that she wanted to be a missionary sister.
“When we were kids we used to collect for what we called at the time the ‘black babies’ mission’ and the missionary magazine also came to our home. I joined the Medical Missionaries of Mary when I was 19 after I finished school. I trained in Drogheda as a nurse after my initial formation and then in Scotland as a mid-wife. I was sent out to Malawi in 1979 and I loved it!”
Initially, Sr Anne worked in St John’s Hospital in Mzuzu in the maternity unit and then she joined a mobile clinic which went out into the villages where she had to master the Chitunbuka language. “The people were wonderful. They had a beautiful simplicity and graciousness of life and were very friendly,” she says.
“We would go out on a Wednesday to one village, have a second clinic in another village and sleep for night in the house of chief’s wife, and then hold a third clinic before going home. It was tough but wonderful work. It was difficult if you were faced with an unexpected delivery because there was no electricity, running water or telephones. But if you had an emergency you dealt with it as best you could.”
After 10 years, Sr Anne handed over the mobile clinic and natural family planning project to a local team and came back to Ireland to train as a chaplain. She returned to Malawi to set up an interdenominational school in the capital of Lilongue for training hospital chaplains, the very first in the country – which also meant learning the Chichewa language of the region.
Chaplains
“I adapted what I had learnt in Clinical Pastoral Education and taught it in Malawi with some friends working there. The only difference was they wouldn’t have had theology degrees or diplomas which are needed in Ireland, but if they are keeping with Church teaching and their leader accepted them as a congregation member then we accepted them to certify as hospital chaplains,” she explains.
“In training the students HIV/Aids was a big factor. We had to give them the skills to listen to patients and help them to analyse their own feelings and difficulties.”
After 15 years, Sr Anne again handed the school over to a local priest. “That’s the double bind for a missionary. It’s wonderful to pass on skills and that the Malawians are able to take over, but you then feel redundant in a sense. But it is good to let them to get on with it and in a sense that is what we trained for,” she says.
Now back in Ireland full-time, Sr Anne is the Missionary Awareness Representative for her congregation and she is currently visiting the parishes of the Derry diocese to talk at Mass about mission work.
“The Irish Missionary Union allocates a diocese to each of the missionary orders to promote mission and the role of Irish people in our missionary work,” she says. “This is my fourth year in the role and I find that people are marvellous. From a missionary point of view it is wonderful to have an opportunity to say thank you in person to people who supported us all our lives in the field – to be able to thank them for their prayers first of all and for their emotional, spiritual and financial support. We couldn’t do what we do without it.”
*Sr Anne Carr will be speaking at Mass in St Mary’s parish in Creggan over the weekend of August 8-9.