Mission to care

With Mission Sunday on October 21st next, Religious Affairs Correspondent Patsy McGarryhas been talking to a remarkable Medical Missionary of Mary nun.

She is of that increasingly rare breed of Irish person, one who has spent a lifetime serving others in the most basic way of all, she has helped them to live. Others, who have been surviving miserably, she has freed from pain.

Maura Lynch is an extraordinary woman. A surgeon and a nun, she has lived and worked nearly all of her adult life in two African countries, Angola and Uganda.

In Angola for 20 years she not only survived minefields, wars and rumours of wars but, during the 1980s in her latter years there, she worked comfortably alongside atheistic medical personnel from Cuba, Russia and East Germany removing limbs and eyes of the wounded, as required, at the 200-bed Chiulo Mission hospital.

Her clinical work included obstetrics and paediatrics and there was a large cohort of patients with TB and leprosy. She was also very involved with training nurses.

After 17 years there she realised there was a great need for more specialist surgery, so she returned to Ireland in 1984 and, at the age of 46, began training as a surgeon at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. On completion, two intense years later, she returned to Angola but, because of war, she had to leave.

It was 1987 and she was assigned to Uganda where she took up duty as consultant surgeon/obstetrician gynaecologist in the 250-bed Kitovu Mission hospital

In the 20 years since she has pioneered an obstetric fistula repair programme which she introduced with the help of British colleagues. When it came to childbirth there she had identified post-obstetric pelvic trauma as a huge medical and social problem among the women.

Seeing at first hand the physical, psychological and social isolation endured by them she became a champion of Dignity and Justice for Women in the Developing World. She saw it as one of her life goals and was responsible for conducting over 1,000 vesico-vaginal fistula repairs on women between 1993 and 2007, a record which it has been predicted may never be bettered.

She also successfully enticed doctors and surgeons out of retirement, mainly from Britain and one Irishman living in Zimbabwe, to go to Uganda for three- to five-week periods at a time during which they performed an estimated 100 vesico-vaginal fistula repairs on women during each session.

In addition, Sr Maura pioneered innovative training programmes in obstetric fistula repair for Ugandan doctors and nurses. She has estimated that to date she has trained 102 men and women in obstetric fistula repair surgery there.

She also became involved in fundraising which resulted in the building of a unique obstetric fistula unit at Kitovu Hospital. It was officially opened in April 2005 and received special recognition from the Ministry of Health in Uganda as the first such training centre in Uganda.

It is hardly surprising then that she is so greatly honoured in Uganda where she has been granted an unprecedented Certificate of Residency for Life by the Government.

When Uganda's President Museveni came to Ireland on a State visit in 2003 he requested that Sr Maura be invited back to a reception for him in Dublin Castle and in his speech there, referred to her by name as somebody who had made a huge contribution to medical services in his country. She is also highly esteemed by professional colleagues in Africa and beyond.

And she is not without honour in her own country.

Last June UCD Medical School conferred on her its highest award, that of Honorary Fellowship of the School, in recognition of her lifetime work of service dedicated to the people of Africa and the causes of women's rights. It is the highest award the school can make to UCD Medical School graduates who have made major contributions to the world of medicine during their lifetime.

All in all not bad for a Corkwoman. She was born in Youghal in 1938 but, as her father worked in the post office, the family kept moving about so that, by the time she decided to join the Medical Missionaries of Mary, she was at school with the Mercy nuns in Killarney while the family was based in Limerick.

From the age of 12 she was attracted to the life and, having seen pictures of the work of the Medical Missionaries in Nigeria, was "absolutely captivated". So in September 1956, two days before her 18th birthday, she joined them in Drogheda.

She began at the Medical School at UCD in 1958 and was in the top three of her graduating class. After internship at St Vincent's hospital she went to London and took a diploma in obstetrics and gynaecology at the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology there.

She went on to Lisbon where she studied tropical medicine and learned Portuguese, as it had already been decided she was going to Angola, a Portuguese colony. She arrived there in 1967.

Although her vision has become impaired, limiting her work in Africa, she doesn't think she could ever live in Ireland again.

"I don't think I could live here anymore . . . the culture shock when I come home. Such choices to be made . . . " she says.

She recalls how, prior to a visit back to Ireland from Angola, she had been cleaning her teeth with salt. She went into a supermarket here and saw all the brands of toothpaste and became so confused she left without buying any. "That kind of thing," she says.

And the waste of money and food makes her angry.

She is astounded, for instance, to see a menu where a meal could cost as much as €70. "That would feed a family in Uganda for a month or pay for a child in boarding school for a full term," she says.

Then there is all the drinking. But Ireland and the Irish people remain very generous, so generous. "There's no doubt about that."

So says Sr Maura, more generous than us all and a member of that declining band of a tradition that made us proud - the Irish missionary movement in Africa.