Jewels from Jane, April 18

"The Moho [Peru] mission was founded on April 18, 1972, when Sisters Teresa [Avalos] and Maureen [Freeman] arrived in their car, a Land Rover donated by Monsignor Tighe from Kansas City, Missouri. The following day, Sister Maria Dolores [Munoz] arrived with her mother who had come from Los Angeles to visit and help the sisters with the move. Sister Maria Dolores wrote:

' This week has been devoted to setting up housekeeping. My Mom has been a godsend, making curtains, etc...She came into Lima on the 27th of March, and we spent two weeks in Arequipa getting her adjusted to the altitude. So far, she's had no trouble at all. Thank God. She'll be here 'til June. It's a great vacation for her, she seldom gets that opportunity.'

"...The sisters chose the mission in Moho out of a desire to serve the most marginated people and because the Prelature of Juli seemed to be well organized and welcoming. In truth, at the beginning, their ministry was not well defined. Among the four founders, Sister Maria Rubina had the greatest ministerial focus because she was a nurse and because the Juli Prelature had decided to collaborate with the government health services. Because of that, soon after her arrival, Sister Maria received an offical appointment from the Health Department to work in the local 'posta medica.'

"For the teaching sisters, the move to Moho was more challenging than they had anticipated. Remembering it, Sister Teresa Said:

' During my first year in Moho, [I did] a lot of crying, [there was] a lot of not knowing what I should be doing. I had been taken out of something that I knew how to do well, which was teaching; and I enjoyed it very, very much. I had a wonderful rapport with our students in the States and even more so with our students in Santa Rosa. I loved them; they loved me; we went to visit their homes and we just got very involved. To go to a new culture, a new language and figure out what I was doing...was a difficult transition for me. And I did cry a lot...thinking I wasn't doing anything, and I was wasting the community's money and that kind of thing. (We were being subsidized.)

Eventually, we got into catechetical programs, we got to visiting the schools; we set up a nice [educational program] based on Montessori, a kind of hands-on for children. We invited the different first grades to come up and...little by little that first year worked out...

By the second year and for the rest of my five years there, I was able to handle it well. I got to know the teachers there very well; it was a wonderful feeling of community, extended, not just the five or six of us who were there later on, but extended into that whole wide Moho community. It was a wonderful experience.

It was an enrichment as far as the culture. We were lucky to [be with] Maria Rubina who was from Peru, because she could help us...If you asked her, and if you were open to listening, she was very open to explaining the customs and why this was that way and why it didn't coincide with my way of thinking or looking at things. That was very helpful.'

"With mutual help and the time necessary to get settled in a new place, the sisters finished their first year convinced that they had made a good decision by choosing Moho as the Congregation's first mission in the Peruvian highlands."

From Mary McGlone's book: Comunidad para el Mundo: The History of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet and the Vice Province of Peru