Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe's ministry of presence

A sad nun is a bad nun. . . . I am more afraid of one unhappy sister than a crowd of evil spirits. . . . What would happen if we hid what little sense of humor we had? Let each of us humbly use this to cheer others. 

                                ~Teresa of Ávila

At this time last year, I had my head down as I ran towards a finish line, completing a full draft of my latest book – a biography of the amazing Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, a sister of the Sacred Heart of Jesus community who lives and works in Gulu, Uganda.

The biography – Rosemary Nyirumbe: Sewing Hope in Uganda -- is part of the Liturgical Press series, People of God. You can check out their other titles here.

It is difficult to express just what a pleasure it has been to write about Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, to be the author who has the privilege of introducing this formidable woman to readers in the U.S.

A woman of deep faith, Sister Rosemary is grounded in the Eucharist, and deeply devoted to Mother Mary. But as she likes to say, don’t dismiss her struggle because she is a nun!

Sister Rosemary is a genuine disciple of Jesus Christ who chooses to grapple daily with what it means to live out her vocation—especially reaching out to the broken and bleeding and needy, the living Body of Christ whom she sees in the women and orphans in northern Uganda.

It is her ministry of presence, above all, that makes her example so powerful and meaningful.

To give you a taste of my book, here’s a brief sample from its beginning:

Our four-wheeling Toyota Land Cruiser snakes and curves in the twilight, struggling to miss as many potholes as possible. But some dirt holes are simply so large that they bring our vehicle to a complete stop before our skilled driver can finally, slowly, move us forward.

Fast or slow, red dirt rises around us like a thick fog, restraining our vision and overpowering our sense of smell. Shockingly, neither the darkness nor the dirt, not even our speed, impedes pedestrians of all ages from sharing the road with us.

I watch a line of three women, one behind the other, carrying five-gallon yellow containers of water on their heads. Even as our car slides past them, the women continue, seemingly unaffected, determined, skillfully maneuvering their own steps around both the fast-moving vehicles and potholes.

We are in northern Uganda, in what is colloquially known as West Nile, a mere stone’s throw away from the South Sudan border.

I’m sharing the back seat of the four-wheel-drive vehicle with Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe, who nudges me, then raises her hand to point to the sign rushing past us, announcing our destination: Moyo. It’s no wonder that she warned me as we got in the car, “The road to Moyo is like going to Calvary! But Moyo . . . Moyo is paradise!”

Much like the way that New York City locals describe distance in time, not miles, Sister Rosemary’s eyes smile as she turns and whispers to me, “Only twenty more minutes,” which in non-Uganda time really means at least another half hour, although not quite an hour.

No matter. She continues fidgeting with the beads of her rosary with her left hand…

The landscape surrounding us is anything but an urban metropolis. It smells humid, and it is eerily silent. The car headlights bounce light into the growing darkness, occasionally revealing a goat in the bush or a group of barefooted children herding a cow with a stick on their way home for supper.

We are slowly climbing up, with mahogany trees and luscious bush showing off their beauty to either side of us.

In modern African history, northern Uganda is infamously known for its violent stories. Idi Amin carried out mass executions of its native Acholi and Lango Christian tribes as well as other ethnic groups, a tragedy followed by years of tribal “bush wars.”

Soon afterward, for decades that persisted into the early 2000s, the region sheltered the violent guerrillas of warlord Joseph Rao Kony and his militia, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), as it moved across the borders of Sudan, Congo, and back.

Hearing the stories of Sister Rosemary Nyirumbe’s life makes the history of northern Uganda seem simultaneously otherworldly and intensely relevant. Her story is, in fact, intricately woven with the tragic, extreme, yet ultimately hopeful history of this region in central Africa.

Best known as the driving force who saved hundreds of children from abduction during the bloody wars that have devastated northern Uganda and Sudan for decades, Sister Rosemary walks with a sense and force of purpose and, always, with joy.

No small task for a woman who not only lived through these often brutal moments in her country’s history, but who also stood up to the evil before her, time and time again—all in the name of what she calls the gospel of presence, healing, and forgiveness.

She was born in Paidha, approximately one hundred miles—but four and a half hours by car—southwest of Moyo. For almost twenty years, she has lived and worked at St. Monica’s Girls Tailoring Centre rescuing and teaching marketable skills to women and children who suffered first when they were abducted, and then again when they were forced to join the violent, gruesome world of Kony’s militia. The one place that has always welcomed them back from the bush is St. Monica’s in Gulu…

Rome Reports described her in 2017 as “the Mother Teresa of Africa.” But, she will interrupt to say, grinning, “None of these things make me taller than what I am! I’m level headed because I don’t see these things as lifting me to be someone different.”

Although active abductions of children in northern Uganda ended in 2006, even now the girls are continuing to escape from their bush captivity. And Sister Rosemary passionately describes story after horrifying story of what these children have lived through and why they need us.

You can order my book here and here! And see an article I wrote about her for St. Anthony Messenger magazine here.