Sister Mary

Last week, we had the privilege of meeting with Sister Mary, who since Father D’Agostino’s death last year has taken over as the director of Nyumbani.

I have been told that I missed out by not getting to meet the founder of Nyumbani, Father D’Agostino, but I considered myself lucky for getting to meet Sister Mary. I was so impressed by her poise, dedication, vast knowledge and enormous compassion for others.


Sister Mary came to Kenya in 1969 from Ireland as a missionary from the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, popularly known as the Loreto Sisters. After arriving in Kenya, she served as the principal of one of the country’s public schools before undergoing training as a psychologist. Once she became accredited with the British Association for Counseling and Psychotherapy, she partnered with Father D’Agostino, who at the time was a psychiatrist and Jesuit priest in Kenya.

Together, they founded Nyumbani in 1992, which was the first hospice center for HIV-positive children in Kenya. In those days, the children who came to Nyumbani would only live to about 10 years old so the approach was mainly palliative care. Father D’Agnostino and Sister Mary organized special occasions for the children such as an airplane tour around Nairobi and a visit to Masai Mara because they wanted to give the children extraordinary treats.

But now Nyumbani’s approach is very different because of the arrival of antiretroviral drugs. Thankfully with these drugs, there’s no known limit to a HIV-positive child’s lifespan.

Nyumbani began administering antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) in 1999 to one girl, and in 2000, more children were put on the drugs. But at the time, the drugs were incredibly expensive and Nyumbani relied on private donors to fund the much-needed drugs. In 2005, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which President Bush started, began supplying ARVs to Nyumbani for free, which has allowed for even more children to go on the drugs.

Sister Mary said the Nyumbani staff had to have an attitude change in order to properly care for these children who were now on life-saving drugs. Instead of looking at them as terminally ill or sick children, they had to look at them as children who have a life and can dream into the future.

But in order to have a future, the children needed education and getting that message across to the children was difficult and at times continues to be difficult. The children had this idea embedded in their minds that they weren’t going to live long so why bother studying hard or having high goals to reach. Therefore, Nyumbani’s main focus became education because in every country in the world—particularly a developing country—education is the gateway to self-reliance.

Sister Mary explained to the children earlier this year that Nyumbani—like any parent—can feed them, clothe them, provide shelter for them, look after them medically, and send them to school. But Nyumbani cannot learn for them. Only they can do that.

Currently, Nyumbani has 78 children enrolled in primary school, 9 enrolled in high school, and 1 enrolled in college and living independently on his own.

Unfortunately, the Nyumbani children still face a lot of discrimination. In the developing world and particularly Kenya, there is a strong taboo around sex. And since HIV is linked with sex here, there is a large stigma surrounding HIV. As a result of the stigma and discrimination, HIV-positive individuals carry an enormous amount of shame—so much so that parents often times will not bring their children to get tested for fear of a positive result. According to Sister Mary, most of the deaths in Nyumbani’s community-outreach Lea Toto program are newly enrolled children because their mothers brought them too late because they were too ashamed to come forward earlier. A child is just too malnourished or their CD4 count is too low and there’s nothing more the Nyumbani staff can do.

I told Sister Mary I was keeping a blog during my visit in Kenya, and I asked her what would be her message for the people back in the states reading my blog.


Her first message was that HIV is simply a medical condition, like diabetes or epilepsy or some orthopedic challenge. That’s it. It’s simply a medical challenge. It is her hope (and mine) that people can become more educated about HIV and realize that HIV-positive individuals are just like any other human beings. That way, the stigmas surrounding HIV/AIDS and the discrimination HIV-positive people face can be greatly reduced or even eliminated.

Her second message was to encourage others to have compassion for the orphans of our world. But not a compassion that just simply feels bad for these orphans but a compassion that is practical such as donations or adoptions. In Kenya alone, there are 1.6 million orphans, and by 2010 there is expected to be 30 million orphans in sub-Sahara Africa.

As we were finishing up our conversation, Sister Mary told me a story about a girl in Ethiopia who after fainting in school recently, told the teacher “I’m sorry I fainted. It wasn’t my day to eat.”

I haven’t been able to forget that story or get those words “It wasn’t my day to eat” out of mind. I don’t understand how we live in a world that allows a child to only eat every other day. I don’t understand how we can all sit comfortably in our homes and know that there are situations like that in our world. I don’t understand how we can watch the six o’clock news tell us about the Darfur genocide, the millions of children starving in the developing world, and the horrific effects of the HIV pandemic and go back to eating our dinner.