E·N·Q·U·I·R·Y
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL
In the sandals of Gonxha Bojaxhiu
Sunday, 05 18, 2008
In 1994, Betty Erecilla embraced her kith and kin in an emotional leave-taking in Bacolod and said goodbye to life’s comforts and pleasures as she forsook her family name. Since then, she has been taking total strangers into her caring embrace. In the past 14 years this petite woman, who stands barely five-feet tall, had sojourned in the slums of Tondo, Naga and Cebu, as well as in the squalid districts of Karachi and Lahore, and moved among the denizens of these places with careless concern for her own safety and health. As if the hazards and discomforts of these places had not been enough, these days this extraordinary Filipina is spending time in war-torn Afghanistan.
Like Gonxha Bojaxhiu of Skopje, more popularly known as Mother Teresa, who at an early age found home in the slums of Calcutta and lived there until she died at 87, Betty Erecilla, who has changed her name to Sister Maribet, finds a home in wherever the indigent and the afflicted reside.
The Missionaries of Charity, the religious order founded by Mother Teresa in 1950, came to Kabul in May two years ago, with four sisters starting a home in the Khallai Fatullah District. One of the more destitute places in Afghanistan, Khallai Fatullah is dotted with rows of mudhouses competing space with lambs, goats and chickens feasting on the garbage strewn all around. Amid this squalor, Sister Maribet and the three other members of the order braved the unforgiving weather of Afghanistan: harsh winters that dipped as low as -30ºC and forbidding summers that shot past 40ºC. But more formidable than the sharp changes of climate was the unwelcome chill that Sister Maribet and her colleagues had to initially endure in this country which is 99 percent Muslim and looks at Christians, missionaries especially, with distrust if not outright enmity.
The chill is gone now, overcome by the sisters’ works of mercy and their missionary zeal. I have seen the sisters at work, and they are a sight to behold as they tended to the needs of the sick and the poor. Many a time I have caught myself wondering whether these diminutive sisters are not mortals but are really angels who have shed their wings and donned the habit of the Missionaries of Charity to bring God’s love to the infirm, the indigent, the unloved, and the dispossessed of the earth.
There is a certain serenity in the countenance of these nuns, Sister Maribet especially. One would never suspect that she is doing a life-threatening work in a country that considers it illegal to convert one to Catholicism. That is a heavy load to bear for anyone whose works of charity must end and stop there, and no farther. Yet, Sister Maribet goes on unperturbed in her mission, flashing one of the most beautiful smiles I ever saw.
In a visit to the Missionaries of Charity Center - that’s where she and her colleagues minister to the sick and the poor - I never saw that beautiful smile of hers abandon her face, not even when one of the children under the care of the Center was throwing tantrums and turning the nursery into mayhem. She showed me the sparse amenities of the Center: a solitary landline telephone and a lone cellphone that they use to communicate with the outside world; a manual typewriter, no computers allowed, I was told. No television. No radio either. The nursery was something else: the 16 autistic children who had been abandoned by their parents or taken from the hospitals of Kabul were enjoying the comforts of a fully-stocked clinic, well-made beds, and toys everywhere.
The two-storey house where Sister Maribet lives is painted all-white. Nothing fancy about the house, not even the wide blue gate which is unlike the many gates I have seen in Kabul: no locks, which speaks much of the openness that the sisters set out to the people of Kabul and their confidence in the protection that God accords them. The chapel at the second floor is likewise sparse. No pews; only a two-feet-tall crucifix on the wall and a small golden chalice on the small altar. There, Sister Maribet and her colleagues repair to after a hard day’s work, to rejuvenate their spirits for the next day’s grind.
In that house Sister Maribet and her colleagues minister to 29 families twice a week - a group that started with only one family in 2006. Many battered women and abandoned children and elderly also find their way to the Center, and the Missionaries of Charity admit them with open arms.
At 44, and with 14 years of grueling missionary work behind her, Sister Maribet jokingly says that she still walks erect but would probably be stooped by the time she reaches the same age at which Mother Teresa died. She has been blessed with good health, never been seriously sick since she came to Kabul or in the other mission areas she was previously posted. She attributes this to the caring hand of God (“He must like what I’m doing,” she says with, again, that beautiful smile) and to the inspiration of Mother Teresa who for the 66 years she worked among the poor and the sick never faced any life-threatening illness.
Sister Maribet talks with a clear voice in a cadence that leaves you mesmerized, making you think this must be how people in Biblical times who found favor with God sounded. And there is nothing in her vocabulary that would make you feel that she is making a hard-sell for her religious order. Very simply and with sincerity, she puts across her appeal of charity before the hundred or so expatriates who attend Sunday mass at the lone Catholic Church in Afghanistan at the Italian Embassy, and manages to persuade them to contribute a little bit more to the sisters’ efforts.
It has taken a lot of courage for a missionary of charity like Sister Maribet to abandon her family in Bacolod, and embrace a life devoid of material necessities, to live simply and reverently in places and countries that are not entirely hospitable to her mission.
Sister Maribet is not a living saint, at least not yet. But she is very well on her way to being one. Sister Maribet need not be called one now, but she is one Filipino we can be proud of, pray for, and must support to the hilt as she goes on in her saintly vocation.
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