Help Irish sister rebuild faithful Catholic school destroyed in Kenyan floods: LifeFunder
HURUMA, Kenya (LifeSiteNews) — An Irish Franciscan Missionary Sister for Africa is appealing to LifeSiteNews readers for help in rebuilding a faithful Catholic school destroyed in last month’s floods.
Sister Miriam Duggan, who has given the past 55 years of her life to Christ through service in Africa, is hoping to buy land on which to rebuild the Mother Kevin Community School she runs in Huruma, Mathare North, a disadvantaged suburb of Nairobi, Kenya. The school, which educates and feeds poverty-stricken children from the slums, was irreparably damaged by the floods which ravaged the area in late April.
In a video meant to bring attention to the children’s plight, Sister Miriam said that the students had arrived back to school to find “mud everywhere” and “books and everything else destroyed.”
But even if the school could be salvaged, the government has decreed that all buildings by the river must be rebuilt farther away.
“Our negotiation at the moment is to buy land higher up,” said Sister Miriam. “Most of the land is 40,000 US dollars. Also, we want to build a schoolhouse to continue to help these poor children.”
LifeSiteNews’ Editor-in-Chief John-Henry Westen visited Sister Miriam and the Mother Kevin Community School in 2022 and remarked that the school had remained faithful to Catholic teaching despite the temptation to put that aside for the sake of grants from ideological colonists.
Impressed by Sr. Miriam’s anti-abortion activism and abstinence program that successfully combated AIDS in Uganda, readers of LifeSiteNews have generously supported her work with Kenyan children in recent years.
READ: Irish nun uses ‘God’s Law’ to defeat abortion and AIDS in Africa
Meanwhile, the school had had a great success in equipping its children for employment. Children from the primary school could choose to go on to high school, and those who excelled there could get government scholarships to university. Children who didn’t do well in their exams could work with Sister Miriam to get the skills they need to train for good trades. Sister Miriam told John-Henry Westen that 89 percent of the school’s graduates were working in stable jobs.
The Mother Kevin Community School is named after an Irish nun who is also known as Servant of God Sister Teresa Kearney (1875 – 1957). Mother Kevin began her missionary work in Africa in 1903 when she first arrived in Kampala, Uganda. She spent over 50 years founding primary and secondary schools, teacher training colleges, nursing colleges, medical facilities, orphanages and leper colonies. According to Sister Miriam, writing for Catholic Ireland, Mother Kevin even got around episcopal objections to a female religious becoming knowledgeable about childbirth and succeeded in studying midwifery and obstetrics. In addition, Mother Kevin was the foundress of both the Little Sisters of St. Francis (1923) and the Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa (1957). Such was her influence that today in Uganda “Kevina” is a word synonymous with hospitals and other charitable institutes. Subsequent to Mother Kevin’s first mission in Uganda, Franciscan Missionary Sisters for Africa have also served in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and South Sudan.
Click Here to help Sr Miriam replace slum school destroyed in Kenyan flood