4
June 10, 2014
diocese/world
T
he Valley Catholic
Sister of Mercy creates Mercy Beyond Borders,
supports women
Today, women Religious are leading
advocacy efforts against human trafficking, heading up national programs
for affordable housing, training pediatric emergency med students at Johns
Hopkins, establishing safe houses for
women coming out of prison, and teaching theology at Yale.
This article profiles Sister Marilyn
Lacey, RSM, a Sister of Mercy and a Bay
Area native, who works with impoverished women in war-ravaged South
Sudan and Haiti.
“You’d be amazed,” Sister Marilyn
said, “at the joy that rises up within you
when you stand with the poor.”
She graduated from Mercy High
School, Burlingame, in 1966, entered Religious formation in the Sisters of Mercy,
and after teaching high school for a
while, felt called by God to work with
refugees. She describes that shift as the
beginning of her conversion from seeking perfection to living compassionately.
That led her to refugee camps overseas, then refugee resettlement work
as Director of Refugee Services for
Catholic Charities in San Jose. During
her tenure, Catholic Charities expanded
its immigration programs for language
and financial literacy, naturalization,
family visa petitions, political asylum,
deportation defense and legal counsel.
In 2008, Sister Marilyn founded Mercy Beyond Borders (MBB) and serves as
Executive Director. MBB is a nonprofit
partnering with displaced women to
alleviate their extreme poverty.
Sister Marilyn develops and supervises projects for women and girls in difficult and dangerous places, especially
South Sudan which currently is experiencing extreme violence by government
forces and rebel groups.
Mercy Beyond Borders knows that
“where women learn, women matter,”
Sister Marilyn said. Currently MBB promotes education for females by supporting the only all-girls primary school in
South Sudan, by providing high school
and college scholarships to nearly 100
young women, and by sponsoring adult
literacy classes for women.
MBB also funds a weekly radio show
on gender equality, trains and funds
women’s micro-enterprise small businesses, and hosts annual leadership
trainings for all MBB Scholars.
In Haiti, MBB supports an all-girls
primary school, girls’ scholarships, an-
Young Haitian girls aspire to become
Scholars.
www.valleycatholiconline.com
Sister Marilyn visits with mother and child
in South Sudan.
nual leadership trainings, and lodging
for Scholars needing a safe place to live.
Sister Marilyn has spent time in
some of the most war-ravaged places
on earth, including the Lao-Thai border,
Sudanese and Somali camps in Kenya,
and with internally displaced persons in
the Eastern Equatoria region of Sudan.
She has also worked extensively with
the Lost Boys of Sudan helping them to
resettle in the US.
In 2001 she was honored by the
Dalai Lama as an “Unsung Hero of
Compassion,” for her life of service with
refugees.
To learn more about Mercy Beyond
Borders, check out photos and videos
at www.mercybeyondborders.org.
In between her travels, Marilyn is
available to speak at parishes and
schools. She also wrote a spiritual
memoir (available from Ave Maria
Press and on Amazon.com): THIS
FLOWING TOWARD ME: a Story of God
Arriving in Strangers.
Sudanese girls study on MBB scholarships.
‘Too much blood has been
shed,’ say South Sudan’s
Religious superiors
By Francis Njuguna
MBB nursing intern visits South Sudan
village.
Movement of Dinka fleeing South Sudan
violence increases tensions
NIMULE, South Sudan (CNS) -- South
Sudan’s recent political strife has sent
a quarter million people into exile in
neighboring countries while 800,000
remain displaced inside the country.
Yet in some places far from the actual
fighting, the population movements
are sparking new conflicts, threatening
to spread the violence into previously
peaceful areas of the nation.
In Nimule, a small city tucked
against the country’s southern border
with Uganda, hundreds of Dinka families fleeing from fighting around Bor in
the central part of the country have arrived en masse, along with their cattle.
Many residents of Nimule, most
members of the Ma’adi tribe, already
nurse resentment about the waves of
Dinka families who arrived during
brutal periods of the country’s liberation struggle in the 1980s and 1990s.
Those Dinka came when the Ma’adi
had fled to Uganda, only to stay on.
When the Ma’adi eventually came
home, many found Dinkas living on
their lands and in their houses.
“When the refugees came back,
they found their places occupied by
the displaced. The government tried to
get them to go back but failed. To this
day, some people from here remain in
Uganda because the displaced took
their places,” said Father John Sebit of
St. Patrick Parish in Nimule.
“Now they are coming here again.
Land is scarce. People feel their land
has been occupied once again.”
Local officials at first prohibited
nongovernmental groups from assisting new arrivals in an attempt to
discourage the displaced people from
staying. Caritas started its clinic anyway, and the local government finally
relented. Aid groups have dug wells
and provided shelter material to several
hundred displaced families in Melijo, a
long day’s walk from Nimule.
NAIROBI, Kenya