By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

Sister Rosita points to a water source in Kenya. (Photo courtesy Anika Walz)

Hawaii-born Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet Rosita Aranita, who is currently based out of St. Paul., Minn., was back in the islands in April for a short visit timed with her 50th jubilee celebration. Sister Rosita said that her life has been one of surprises, including the unexpected opportunity last year to go to Kenya and establish clean water projects.

Since then, Sister Rosita has learned about a new country and culture and its struggles to overcome poverty, HIV/AIDS and a severe shortage of clean water. She also was in Kenya in December when unexpected violence broke out over a contested presidential election.

“I never know where I am going to end up,” Sister Rosita said in an interview at the Diocese of Honolulu’s chancery on April 3. “Every time I’ve planned something it never turns out [as expected]. It’s like a revelation to me.”

Sister Rosita was born in Kunia on Oahu and raised in Waipahu. She went to Waipahu and Farrington High Schools before professing her first vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Carondelet (CSJ) in 1958 and graduating from Mount St. Mary College in Los Angeles.

Although she was assigned as a teacher for her first eight years after college, Sister Rosita says that teaching was not her calling.

Instead over the next several decades, she did various human service and community organizing jobs in Hawaii and on the Mainland. She fought for affordable housing, helped displaced sugar workers on the Big Island, set up youth programs, and did parish and diocesan social ministry work. She also spent time community organizing in the Philippines and Micronesia.

In July 2006, while at a CSJ Federation meeting in Milwaukee, she was asked by Sister Irene O’Neill, the executive director of Ministries Foundation of the St. Paul Province, if she’d be interested in spearheading projects to provide clean water in India.

The India assignment fell through, but she began working with David Opap, a native Kenyan living in Minnesota, who was trying to establish a water project in Adiedo, Kenya, with the funding assistance of the Rotary Club of White Bear Lake. Opap’s own mother had most likely died from cholera contracted through tainted drinking water.

Projects like this fit into the CSJ charism of “unity and reconciliation,” Sister Rosita said, seeking out needs and addressing them.

“We were never made for one specific ministry,” she said.

The water crisis

Sister Rosita soon learned the extent of Kenya’s water crisis.

According to Water Partners International, only 61 percent of the country’s 36.9 million people have access to relatively safe water sources. Many rivers, streams and other bodies of water, including freshwater Lake Victoria, which borders southwest Kenya, are polluted.

Sister Rosita says that almost 70 percent of people living around Lake Victoria have waterborne diseases. Many of the country’s regions have little annual rainfall and inadequate means of collecting it when it does rain.

“The whole country is dying of thirst,” she said, “and the whole continent is in the same position.”

Females are responsible for collecting water each day. Because many must walk long distances to water sources, girls often can’t attend school and women lose hours from their day.

Solving this problem would liberate women and girls so that they could get an education, generate income, support their families, and move ahead, she said.

Adding to Kenya’s water problems, half of the population lives below the poverty line. It is believed that 30 to 40 percent of Kenyans are infected with HIV or AIDS. The country has 2 million orphans.

But these are just statistics. “You really can’t know the extent of the problems until you are in it,” Sister Rosita said.

The trip to Kenya

In January 2007, Sister Rosita traveled with Opap to southwest Kenya. Opap stayed for a week to introduce her to people in the area. Sister Rosita found a local partner in Mary Lieta, a retired principal of a Catholic girls school.

After five months of assessing the situation and making further contacts for the now named “Kenya Water Project,” Sister Rosita and Lieta returned to St. Paul for meetings and to prepare two St. Joseph Workers volunteers, Anika Walz and Angie Van den Hemel, to return with them to Kenya.

Their work is to help villages create clean, reliable water sources through rain catchments and drilled wells.

The involvement of the local community is key. Sister Rosita, Lieta, Walz, and Van den Hemel worked with local chiefs, clan elders and village councils to identify locations for wells and catchment systems. They surveyed needs of the population, and paid for a formal proposal after consultation with a water technician or engineer.

“As much as possible, we try and get the people involved and do the homework,” she said. “They know their communities like the back of their hands.”

From its first Rotary-funded project in Adiedo Village, the Kenya Water Project now has 15 projects in five districts in west, central and coastal Kenya provinces.

Violence breaks out

The planning of the water projects was picking up momentum and moving into the fundraising stage when the riots broke out.

Despite the country’s poverty and health problems, Kenya had been considered one of Africa’s more politically and economically stable countries with a promising future. That reputation vanished when violence erupted across the country following the announcement of the Kenyan presidential election results on Dec. 27.

Current president Mwai Kibaki of the largest Kenyan tribe, the Kikuyus, was accused of rigging the votes in his favor over rival candidate and Luo tribe member Raila Odinga. Odinga also happens to be from Nyanza Province, where Sister Rosita was living and working.

International media reported fighting all across the country. Nearly 1,200 people died. Sister Rosita said that in the rural area where she was, things were pretty peaceful and that she did not feel in immediate danger. However, there was “a lot of fear circulating and a lot of rumors.”

On the advice of the local people, she and the other volunteers avoided travel into the larger cities, and instead stayed in the Catholic compound where they lived.

Sister Rosita was shocked at how quickly transportation and communication were disrupted and food and fuel prices skyrocketed. “It was unbelievable to us that you could be isolated so suddenly,” she said.

Because of fears for the safety of Sister Rosita and the two St. Joseph Workers, their superiors decided it would be best for them to leave Kenya. Big Island Catholic, Patrick Walsh, who knows Sister Rosita from her time working on the island, helped arrange transportation to Nairobi and then back to Minneapolis on Jan. 25.

“We would have stayed” given a choice, she said. But in hindsight, the break gave them time to raise more money for their projects.

“So it all works out,” she said.

As of April, political compromise and collaboration appear to have brought a tentative peace to Kenya.

Project continues

Sister Rosita plans to spend the next several months finding financial backers for the water projects to move them into the building stage. Walz and Van den Hemel are working from the Mainland. Mary Lieta is keeping the project afloat in Kenya.

“My whole thing is, you can’t get water if you don’t have money,” Sister Rosita said.

Sister Rosita spent two weeks in California in March to celebrate her 50th jubilee with the Sisters of St. Joseph Los Angeles province, where she first entered the order. She also spoke to a Rotary Club in Beverly Hills while she was there.

In Hawaii, she visited one Rotary Club and spoke to neighbor island groups. Traveling with her was Kenyan Catholic priest, Father Gregory Otenga Ombok, and a fellow religious from St. Paul, Presentation Sister Kay Cota.

Sister Rosita has taken on another long-term goal for herself — to build a network of all the Catholic-operated water projects in Kenya. She hopes to get back there in July after establishing a reliable funding conduit between the U.S. and Kenya.

And Sister Rosita hopes to continue this type of community organizing work for as long as she can. “If my health is okay, why not,” she said. “It’s better to wear yourself out, then to bore yourself out.”