SHARING Christ’s love for the poor has had a lasting impact on Salesian Sister Carolina Maria Correia and the community she serves.
The missionary sister is in Brisbane as part of Catholic Mission’s Mission Month, sharing the work she does in East Timor and giving thanks to the Church in Australia for their contribution.
Sr Carolina remembered how powerful it was to see a missionary priest giving his life to others.
She was a teenager and said she did not know the Gospel well at the time.
But she saw this missionary priest giving his life over to the poor and knew she wanted to do the same.
“This man is really a witness of Christ’s love for others,” she said.
It spurred her on to consider religious life and a year later she moved to the convent.
After studying in the Philippines and meeting Sr Alma, a doctor, she resolved to study nursing and return to care for her people.
Sr Carolina is now working at the Maria Auxiliadora Clinic in Venilale.
The clinic was small and the challenges were big.
People travel on foot for two to three hours to get to the clinic.
She said many people came to the clinic with wounds and skin diseases as well as mothers and babies who were malnourished.
She gathered as many mums as she could to teach them about how to care for their children, how to promote good hygiene and good nutrition.
The sisters take in any children whose mothers die during childbirth, typically due to malnutrition, and nurse the babies for a year.
Afterwards, they often enter an orphanage run by the sisters.
The boys’ orphanage is home to 180 and the girls’ about 100.
Even in the face of tragedy, her faith was unshakeable.
“I look at Jesus,” she said.
She said when challenges arose, she would call for Jesus’ help in prayer.
He showed her how to “dedicate myself to other people”.
Sr Carolina said it was a grace to come to Brisbane, to meet the donors who kept her clinic going and to learn from medical practitioners in Australia.
She said she was impressed at how lay people had taken up the mantle for ministry previously undertaken by religious and ordained people.
She wanted to spread that spirit, to encourage lay people where she lived to get more involved in leading the Church’s mission.
