A shoot sprouts from the root of Damien in the fertile fields of India, nurtured by women whose faith was cultivated in Hawaii

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

“Actually, if they painted Calcutta it would be a beautiful city.” Sister Jane Francis Leandro was serious. In the sprawling Indian metropolis that has become a metaphor for squalor and destitution, the Sacred Hearts missionary saw loveliness in its old colonial buildings.

That wasn’t always her outlook. When she first visited in 1991, she was deeply distressed by the noise and grime and the fact that there were no trees.

“What’s the matter with you,” she recalled her host Sister Regina Mary Jenkins exclaiming. “There are lots of trees!”

Sure enough, there they were, all along the highways.

“I never saw them,” Sister Jane Francis said. “I was so disoriented.”

The Maui-born nun has long since adjusted to Calcutta. She now calls it home.

She was back visiting the islands this month with fellow Indian missionary Sister Rose Henry Reeves. The two Hawaii-born women chatted with the Hawaii Catholic Herald last week about modern life in a foreign mission.

Sister Jane Francis is 70 and Sister Rose Henry 65, but both look a decade younger.

You won’t find a happier pair. These are not grim preachers by a long shot. Their stories are punctuated with laughter and enthusiasm. Hardships are recalled with humor, ironies with amusement, challenges with smiles.

20-year anniversary

Last month marked the 20th anniversary of the arrival of Hawaii Sacred Hearts Sisters in India. On Sept. 7, 1987, Sacred Hearts Father William Petrie welcomed Sister Rose Henry and Sister Regina Mary to Bhubaneswar, a city on India’s northeast coast, in Orisa, one of the subcontinent’s poorest states.

The sisters had gone to help Father Petrie care for the area’s Hansen’s disease patients. There the priest had established the Damien Institute — named for the hero of Molokai who inspired his vocation — to fight the disease with medicine, education and perseverance.

Back in the 1980s, Sister Jane Francis explained, “the general chapter told the provinces that we needed to get back to our missionary thrust, and they wanted every province to open one mission.”

India was on the top of the list. Father Petrie had been begging for sisters for years. Japan also had requested help.

“We couldn’t make up our minds, so we went to both,” Sister Jane Francis said.

The sisters eventually pulled out of Japan. Sister Regina stayed in India until 1995, the year Hawaii-born Sister Grace Marie Tom and Sister Jane Francis arrived.

At first, Sister Jane Francis didn’t want to go to India. For years she had been a teacher and administrator, first in Gardena, Calif., then at Sacred Hearts Academy. She was also her community’s vocation director and treasurer.

“I didn’t feel called to go,” she said. “But if the community asked me to go because if they think I have the gifts and they need me, I’d have to say yes.”

She explained further, “If God tells me that he wants to take me on a journey and he said meet me in India, and I say, ‘No thank you, I will meet you in Kaimuki,’ then I am not going anywhere.”

Basic instinct for God

India had enlightening surprises for Sister Jane Francis.

She was particularly struck by what she called the Indian people’s “basic instinct for God.”

“Every person you meet in India has this reverence for God,” she said.

“They are not all worshiping in the same way, but they have a basic instinct for God, and a great reverence for God, and a great reverence for any person or any thing that they consider holy.”

“If they know that you are there in the service of God, they respect you,” she said.

“And they’ll protect you,” she added.

“And that is why you feel safe in India,” said Sister Rose Henry.

Both sisters admitted to other places in India that are indeed dangerous, where they cannot go because of sectarian strife and anti-American feelings. But where they live, Muslims, Hindus and Christians exist in harmony.

In fact, she said, according to their custom, “on your feast day, you treat the others; on their feast days, they treat you.”

“That’s the way they live,” she said.

The next generation of sisters

Sister Rose Henry has seen her duties change over the past two decades.

On her arrival, a month’s training in Hansen’s disease got her started as a medical practitioner. No amount of expertise, however, could stand up to the disease’s millennia-old stigma which kept its victims in the shadows and away from a simple treatment and cure.

Sister Rose Henry even saw doctors refusing to touch the patients. The sisters themselves were evicted from the home they ran for the daughters of leprosy patients when neighbors found out who they were, even though the girls themselves did not have the disease.

“There was just this terrible fear,” she said.

Thanks to education, attitudes and conditions improved, and around seven years ago, the sisters moved from health care to vocation and formation work. They knew that if the ministry of the Sacred Hearts Congregation was going to continue in India, it would have to be passed to a new generation.

In 1999, Sister Jane Francis moved to Calcutta — about an eight-hour train ride north — to open the pre-novitiate program with the Sacred Hearts Brothers.

Sister Rose Henry, now the vocations director, remained with Sister Grace Marie in Bhubaneswar where they run a hostel for village girls of high school age, and a candidacy program for young women considering a vocation as a Sacred Hearts Sister.

The hostel, which opened with 18 girls and now has eight, exists to support girls while they pursue an education. It’s their way out of a life of servitude and poverty.

The candidacy program is a separate house for women who want to become Sacred Hearts Sisters. In their first year, they experience community life and learn English. They continue by earning the college or professional degree required for the pre-novitiate program. There are about 15 candidates now in formation in Bhubaneswar.

The pre-novitiate in Calcutta has four women who take classes three days a week in spiritual and human development, sacraments, religious life and congregational studies with six brothers who are preparing to become Sacred Hearts priests. The rest of their training is spent working among the poor.

The Sacred Hearts Sisters and Brothers, who live about five minutes apart, collaborate closely in their formation programs.

After about six months of pre-novitiate, the women go to the Sacred Hearts formation house in Manila, Philippines, as novices. There they make their temporary vows.

In July 2006, in Bhubaneswar, Sister Pushpa Rani Arputham became the first Indian woman to make her final profession as a Sacred Hearts Sister. Four others have made temporary vows.

The Sacred Hearts community in India is too small to be a full-fledged congregational region. Rather they belong to PPC Asia (Priority Project of the Congregation in Asia) which encompasses Philippines, Indonesia, and India. The order has another priority project in Africa.

“We function like a province, make our own decisions,” said Sister Rose Henry.

Sister Jane Francis is a councillor — a member of the governing council — for Asia. Asia’s major superior, Spanish Sister Aurora Laguarda, lives with Sister Jane Francis.

Spirit of Mother Teresa

According to Sister Jane Francis, Indians have a hard time comprehending the idea of unmarried American women in their country dedicating their lives to helping people. That is until the name of Mother Teresa is mentioned. Then it clicks. Everybody knows Mother Teresa. The sisters are like Mother Teresa.

Mother Teresa looms large in India 10 years after her death, especially in Calcutta, the home of her worldwide order — the Missionaries of Charity.

Or “MCs,” as the Sacred Hearts Sisters call them.

Her powerful spirit has created a secondary ministry for the Sacred Hearts’ Calcutta house, which is a 10-minute walk from Mother Teresa’s motherhouse.

Sister Jane Francis keeps her doors open for the young, idealistic women and men who come from all over the world to work alongside the Missionaries of Charity.

“Hundreds of volunteers are there all year long,” she said. “Big groups from Spain, Japan, Korea, all the European countries, even America. We just tell any of the volunteers to come on down because that is part of our ministry.”

“They are the most inspiring group of people,” she said. “It is amazing, amazing, amazing.”

Sister Jane offers a string of examples she has known personally: the very wealthy young woman from Romania who became a Missionary of Charity; the group of young people who slip quietly — and illegally — into a horrid mental hospital after hours to care for discarded patients; a nationally-known children’s television host from Spain who now teaches Calcutta street children; a European man who goes back home a few months a year to raise money to return to India to support the orphanage he built.

They live wherever they can, usually in bad conditions. “And they pay for everything,” Sister Jane Francis said.

Many hop across the border to Nepal to renew their three-month tourist visas so that they can double, triple, quadruple the length of their stays.

“The policemen close their eyes,” she said, to this Indian version of illegal aliens.

India’s oppressive poverty is one thing Sister Jane Francis will never get used to.

“The very hardest thing for me is all the people begging on the streets. And you cannot give them money. They know where to go if they need money or they need food.

“Sometimes if a kid follows me for two blocks I just take it [money] out and do this,” she said, demonstrating a covert low, backhanded pass.

“It’s just hard,” she said, adding that some women borrow babies for the day to make the begging more pathetic.

“When we get donations in Calcutta, we give part of it to the parish for food and education,” Sister Jane Francis said. The rest goes to their doctor, who was Mother Teresa’s physician and who has a clinic for the poor.