The Mass had finished in the small makeshift chapel of Mapuordit mission. Outside, three blind elders started intoning a traditional Dinka song. I understood two words: Mary and kawaja, foreigner in Arabic. In the end someone translated the song: the singers were praising Sr. Mary Batchelor, comparing her to a good cow that has plenty of milk and feeds everybody.
Sister Mary, 80, completed 60 years of religious life on July 2, 2008. She dedicated the last 13 years to the students of Mapuordit, in Southern Sudan’s Rumbek diocese. She is the principal of the elementary school and the directress of the secondary school. The two institutions have almost 1,400 students.
Mary Batchelor was born in 1928 in Cohuna, Victoria State in the South of Australia. Her mother was of Irish descent and her father had his roots in Scotland. They had five boys and three girls. Three chose the priesthood and two, the sisterhood.
Mary never dreamed to be a nun. She wanted to marry and have lots of children. Then, when she was 17, she was almost leaving Bendigo boarding school when she was struck by a picture of Our Lady hanging on the wall. “The picture seemed to jump from the wall at me saying ‘You must become a sister,’” she recalls.
Suddenly, she decided to join the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, a congregation engaged in teaching. “My life has been marked by sudden decisions,” Sr. Mary explains.
A SUDDEN CALL
Sister Mary took her first vows on July 2, 1948, after two years of formation. She spent her next 40 years in Australia teaching in Catholic schools all over the country. She confesses she never felt the call for the missions, though her congregation has communities abroad where she could have volunteered. She remembers when she professed in 1948, just after the Second World War had finished, everyone was talking about missions and many of her sisters decided to return to the communities the war forced them to leave in South Pacific. She did not feel the call. She even felt guilty about it.
When Sr. Mary turned 60, another sudden decision rocked her life. She was attending an education meeting within the congregation as representative of Darwin’s urban schools. The provincial of the Daughters of Our Lady of the Sacred Heart informed the group that a bishop from South Africa was asking for sisters to run a mission school. Sr. Mary just jumped into it!
“Why, having never been a missionary for 40 years and never having any desire to go to the missions, did I suddenly know that was where I was meant to be?,” she asks herself. Sr. Mary spent the next seven years at Dwars River in the Northern Province of South Africa working in a mission boarding school for black boys and girls. She taught English and Mathematics.
She recalls that the students were very poor, but now the school is one of the best in South Africa. Those were the last days of apartheid. Sister Mary was able to vote in the first free elections in the country.
A DEATH AND A NEW START
Seven years after arriving in South Africa, Sr. Mary accepted to come to Mapuordit, in Southern Sudan in yet another sudden decision.
In 1995, two sisters of her congregation came to Mapuordit, in Southern Sudan’s Lakes State. The mission was started in 1993 by a local priest and two Comboni missionaries to settle the displaced from Yirol after the town was bombed and destroyed by government troops fighting the Sudan People’s Liberation Army.
When one of Sr. Mary’s brothers died, a sister rang from Nairobi to present her condolences. Sr. Mary thanked and asked if in Mapuordit there was a school. In fact, there was a school started by a Comboni missionary in 1997. So, she decided to join the group. “Again I just knew it was where I wanted to go,” she says with her broad and beautiful smile.
And she came to Mapuordit where she has directed the elementary and secondary schools for the past 13 years. No wonder that someone told her during the celebrations of her diamond jubilee that Mapuordit was her new name.
The students call her Mary, our diamond. During the celebrations, Yoru Juma, a former student, thanked the sister for the nice words she uses to encourage her students: “We never forget the way you helped us to become the people we are today. You are a very special lady.”
The elementary school of Mapuordit has 1,125 students and the secondary, 180. “But they could be many more if there were boarding facilities,” Sr. Mary laments.
Another challenge is the number of girls attending school. In the lower grades, they are about 300. But, when the time comes, they are forced to leave the school and marry. In Grade 8, there are five or six and the secondary school has only seven female students.
Sr. Mary admits that this has been a hard battle. But, two years ago, one girl completed Grade 12 and is now studying at a university in Kenya.
“It was our triumph and the most wonderful experience to have a girl right through finishing Form 4 [Grade 12],” she says, her face jubilant.
AFRICA IN THE HEART
Sr. Mary found the comparison with a cow that feeds people with its milk a very beautiful image. “It is the first time I have ever been related to a cow, but the symbolism is very beautiful. Life comes from the milk of their cows and they have received something from me,” she declares.
Sister Mary says that the highlight of her 60 years as a nun has been her service to education. And she does not want to retire, but rather to hand over the direction of the schools to a younger sister. She knows she can still give a lot and wants to stay as long as she is able to. Sr. Mary says she stays on because she has three strong beliefs: in results she cannot see; in her mission to drop a few seeds, though the germination is God’s part; in the power of prayer. “I do really believe that God put Africa into my heart, that Africa is my home, particularly Sudan, here. It is hard to explain these things. It is just something you know within yourself,” she says.
“What kept me going is my great love for God and if I had my time all over again, I would do it again,” she concludes with a wonderful, even mischievous, laugh.
