Present!

We came streaming in, via Zoom, from different generations (age range from late 20s to late 80s) and from different places (all over the Philippines and other parts of Asia, the States, Europe, and Australia).

We were mostly health professionals but there were journalists, academics, and church people, too, and we had gathered together to honor Sister Mary Grenough of the Maryknoll Sisters, who spent most of her life serving the Philippines, taking on the nickname Mayang. She passed away Saturday in upstate New York, in the Maryknoll Sisters’ retirement facility, aged 88.

We were all there with heavy hearts, grieving and yet seeing our memorial service as a celebration of a good life. Not good in the sense of luxury because Sister Mayang lived simply, but good as—well, someone at the service actually called her a saint, and I’m sure all of us agreed.

Sister Mayang belonged to a generation of religious who set out for distant shores—her hometown was in Kentucky—in the 1960s. Theirs was an era when nuns still wore the habit, with evangelization in mind, in the traditional sense of teaching catechism and prayer.

But the 1960s was also an era of change, with Vatican II addressing issues of the modern world, including confronting overwhelming poverty and inequality in the so-called developing world, with political repression and dictatorships marking the 1970s.

Many nuns left the safe confines of their convents to serve the people, among them Sister Mayang and Sister Ann Maloney, both nurses who worked in Negros among sugar workers and saw some of the worst poverty and political violence in the Philippines.

The first Maryknoll Sister I met was actually Sister Helen Graham, who was teaching theology in college, and she introduced me to Sister Mayang and Sister Ann Maloney.

Long story short, I ended up volunteering to help out in their community-based health programs (CBHPs). They didn’t quite know what to do with a veterinary student, but my background did allow me to do public health work. In the years that followed, I was to meet many more nuns, and a few priests, and many lay religious workers, Catholic and Protestant, who had given up on charity health services, which they felt were only perpetuating dependency and whitewashing the bigger problems that created poor health.

The CBHPs believed in training villagers, many barely literate, to become community health workers who could provide health education for fellow villagers, mobilize people for health campaigns, including vaccinations, and treat common illnesses, sometimes even providing minor surgery. This was long before barangay health workers and primary health care.

Another CBHP pioneer, the late Dr. Mita Pardo de Tavera, so trusted the ability of the poor to help themselves that she set up an organization, AKAP, that concentrated on tuberculosis control, with health workers who could even collect sputum samples and process them for microscopic examination to detect the TB bacilli.

Sister Mayang and the nuns of the Rural Missionaries of the Philippines introduced us to a new Church with a “preferential option” for the “poor, deprived and oppressed.” They were there encouraging the mostly young health professionals to stay on. Former health secretary Manuel Dayrit was at the memorial and talked about how Mayang was one reason he worked with CBHPs for eight years, including a time with AKAP. Remember, this was a time when the majority of Filipino health professionals were leaving the Philippines after graduation and migrating to the US. Many of us were challenged by religious like Sister Mayang who were more Filipino than many Filipinos. Sister Mayang did leave the Philippines, but to serve in Myanmar. She was always an internationalist, which was why her memorial was attended by people from all over the world.

In this time of red-tagging, I have to laugh and tell people that, yes, I was studying in UP in the 1970s, but I was radicalized not by faculty or students but by nuns. Preparing for the memorial, I did think it wasn’t so much the nuns radicalizing students, or students radicalizing the nuns, than our waking up to social realities together.

In Latin America, when activists hold memorial services or political gatherings, they call out the names of people who have died, or who have been “disappeared” by the authorities—desaparecido in Spanish. And as each name is called, the assembly would declare “Presente!” to show that people who served the country, and the people, live on through those left behind.

Sister Mayang and many others who have chosen to risk their lives, especially now in our COVID-19 times, still remain with us. Presente!

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