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October
23, 2006
VOL.
44, NO. 18Oakland,
CA
Marist Sister spent 30 years as a missionary
When she was
a young girl, Sister Rufina Medina never thought that she was going to
be religious, although her six brothers had decided to consecrate their
lives to God. “I did not want to be a nun because I wanted to live
my life in a different way, so I decided to study to become a nurse,”
she said.
But God’s calling was stronger and in 1956 she joined the Marist
Missionary Sisters in Boston. This past Aug. 15, she celebrated 50 years
of religious life, 30 of which were spent as a missionary in Peru and
Colombia. Today she is a catechist at St. Felicitas Parish in San Leandro.
As a young Sister, she studied religious education at the Catholic University
of Washington, D.C. and then traveled to Jamaica to work with leprosy
patients. She went to Peru for the first time in 1961 to work as an English
teacher for children in a school of the Marist Brothers.
“Those kids on many occasions did not have anything to eat, so we
began to do social and pastoral work, too,” she remembers.
At the same time she enrolled in a school in Lima to study geography and
to improve her Spanish. Her parents were of Spanish ancestry, but she
was born in Colorado and, as she explains, in her house she spoke more
English than Spanish.
In 1981 she left Peru and traveled to Monteria in the north of Colombia
to promote religious vocations among the women of the region.
“There, we began to do pastoral work from nothing,” she said.
“We worked with the displaced ones who had fled the violence”
caused by narcotics traffickers and guerrillas.
Marist Sister Rufina Medina found that despite their
poverty, the children of Bogota, Colombia, remain playful and happy.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF SISTER RUFINA MEDINA
“At
the beginning I had nightmares in which a guerrilla was going to kill
me. I dreamed that Jesus had called me and said to me that I should be
prepared to die,” she remembers. “I spoke on the matter with
my superior. She told me to pray and I attended a retreat. After that
experience all my fears disappeared.”
She arrived in Bogota during the time when Pope John Paul II was visiting
the city in July 1986, days when the country was dealing with the taking
of the Palace of Justice by a group of guerrillas and the destruction
of the city of Armero by a volcanic eruption eight months earlier that
had killed 25,000 people.
“When I arrived to Bogota, there were frequent bomb explosions and
we lived in a very poor district,” Sister Medina said. “We
managed to unite the town in its faith. There was no parish and we had
to teach the people the meaning of the Church, since many of them came
from very remote areas and they never had been in contact with the Catholic
faith.”
Her work also centered on visiting families in the community. “It
was necessary to accompany to the town in its pain,” she said.
Despite their great difficulties, the Colombians had a spirit of celebration,
she said. “That is what keeps them alive. They are very happy people,
and they know how to celebrate, to dance and to sing.”
She remembers that when she lived in the Diana Turbay district, she and
all the neighbors had to gather water from a truck. Sometimes there were
fights for the liquid. “That fight for life impressed me,”
she said.
She also helped the people of that community to build their houses and
she saw when they got electrical service, an aqueduct and paved roads.
“They helped each other. There was a very good spirit, which boosted
my spirit.”
Ten years later she returned to Peru to continue her pastoral work there.
During her three decades in South America, Sister Medina saw much poverty,
pain and suffering, but she said those experiences marked her life and
allow her to give more value to the small things.
