Viriditas2: Soul Greening
Interviewed by Sister Malia Dominica Wong, OP
Hawaii Catholic Herald
When I was in grade school in the 1950s, I remember making leprosy bandages. We would tear up old sheets that would then be sent somewhere.
As a young child, I was too young to catch the details of what we were doing, whether it was going to Father Damien or elsewhere. I only learned about Mother Marianne when I came to Hawaii.
Seventeen years ago, after 44 years of being a principal and teacher in western New York, I got a phone call that there was a Sister of St. Francis who needed a vice principal. I didn’t recognize her name as just a year before we had a canonical merge of the Pittsburgh, Buffalo and Hastings communities with us in Syracuse to become what we are now known as, the Sisters of Saint Francis of the Neumann Communities.
I asked the sister when she needed me, and she said yesterday. Within a week after making a mini-discernment retreat, I was in Hawaii.
I knew nothing of the Hawaiian culture. From St. Joseph School in Hilo, I eventually moved to Saint Francis School in Manoa.
Much of my learning about Mother Marianne came through when I lived at the St. Francis convent with Sister Theresa Chow and Sister Rose Annette Ahuna. They had volunteered to go to Kalaupapa to continue the Franciscan Sisters’ presence there and to support the community.
I eventually responded to another call for volunteers, this time to accompany Sister Alicia Damien Lau who was already there.
Being here has been a transformative experience. My appreciation for saints in general, and Mother Marianne in particular as an intercessor, has grown. Reading the book “Pilgrimage and Exile” and the journal of Sister Leopoldina Burns, who also lived here and worked with Mother Marianne, gives you a clearer sense of the person. I try to share my admiration for the virtue in her life.
Here, I can be found working at the Kalaupapa Store, doing yardwork, responding to patient and resident requests for assistance and putting together the Mother Marianne Circle-Kalaupapa Update newsletter, which is our outreach to the wider community. When visitors and pilgrims arrive, we share with them the stories of Mother Marianne and the sisters. We take them to see where Mother worked, fished and enjoyed life.
As people shared their faith and prayers held for the sick, or in thanksgiving of seemingly miraculous healings, they would often say that visiting Kalaupapa changed their lives. However, little did they know they have been impacting Sister Alicia’s and my faith and our sense of God’s healing power, generosity and care for all people.
Standing over the grave of Mother Marianne is a statue of Jesus on the cross and St. Francis kneeling at his feet. It seems to me that the loving gaze between Jesus and Francis and vice versa was the fire and driving force for Mother Marianne, Father Damien and Joseph Dutton.
Sister Barbara Jean Wajda is 62 years professed. She is from Buffalo, New York, and is in her seventh year of residency at St. Elizabeth convent in Kalaupapa.
