She grew up in Liloan, Southern Leyte, where clinics were scarce, and travel to hospitals could take hours. In many cases, illness was endured rather than treated. These were conditions she would later confront again–not as a child observing them, but as a doctor determined to change them.
After earning her medical degree, she practiced for three years at her family’s clinic in Liloan. It was a stable and promising path, one that could have led to a comfortable life in mainstream medicine. But even then, something in her experience had begun to unsettle that trajectory.
From 1966 to 1969, she joined her siblings–also in the medical profession–in conducting medical missions in depressed communities. The work exposed her to a different reality: families who could not afford even the most basic care, communities where disease spread easily because there were no trained health workers, and patients who sought help only when their condition had become critical.
SISTERS OF ST. PAUL OF CHARTRES
There, she encountered not only poverty, but the structural absence of care–no clinics, no trained personnel, no system to respond. It was this absence, more than anything else, that shaped her decision. In 1969, she entered the Sisters of St. Paul of Chartres, leaving behind a conventional medical career. She did not abandon medicine. She redefined its purpose.
As a young missionary surgeon–nun, she was assigned to Lake Sebu in the 1970s, a remote town in southern Philippines. Reaching many of the communities required hours of walking, often crossing rivers and navigating difficult terrain. Patients arrived exhausted, sometimes carried by relatives, having traveled long distances for a chance at treatment.
She worked in a bamboo clinic, where resources were limited and improvisation was often the difference between life and death. Equipment was scarce. Supplies were uncertain. Yet the need was constant.
In one instance, faced with a critical case and no access to standard intravenous fluids, she used coconut juice as a substitute during surgery. It was an improvised solution born out of necessity. The patient survived. Such moments did not define her work as extraordinary. To her, they were simply part of what it meant to respond when no one else could.
Across these isolated communities, Sr. Eva did more than treat patients. She trained local residents, helped organize basic health systems, and worked with families to rebuild their capacity to live with dignity. She understood early that her presence, however committed, would always be temporary. “Sooner or later, I would be reassigned,” she said in an interview. So she focused on what would remain.
BAREFOOT DOCTORS
Before leaving Lake Sebu after seven years, she trained her first batch of 17 “barefoot doctors”–community members taught to diagnose and treat common illnesses, administer basic care, and respond to emergencies. “They are not medical doctors,” she explained. “But they can treat common diseases.”
The impact was measurable. According to her, the incidence of disease in the communities dropped by one-third. The model was simple but effective: bring knowledge closer to the people who needed it, rather than expecting the people to reach distant systems that were often inaccessible.
Her own formation as a physician continued alongside her missionary work. She served as a resident physician at the Philippine General Hospital from 1973 to 1974 and later at a medical center from 1980 to 1983. She pursued postgraduate training in internal medicine, radiology, orthopedics, and general surgery at PGH, and further specialized in surgery, ultrasound, and imaging in hospitals in Hong Kong and the United States.
This combination–formal specialization and field experience–allowed her to move between two worlds: the structured environment of institutional medicine and the unpredictable realities of mission work. When she was eventually reassigned to Manila, she did not leave her mission behind. She expanded it.
In Singalong, she extended the reach of a community clinic, making healthcare more accessible to underserved families in the city. At the same time, she continued training barefoot doctors, adapting the model she had developed in rural and Indigenous communities to an urban context.
In 1984, she institutionalized her work by founding the Foundation of Our Lady of Peace Mission (FOLPM). What started as a response to immediate needs gradually evolved into a network of services addressing both health and livelihood.
The foundation established clinics and feeding centers across Metro Manila, including Manila, Quezon City, Makati, Parañaque, and Las Piñas. It drew support from volunteers, donors, and church leaders, including the late Fr. James B. Reuter and later Cardinal Antonio Luis Tagle, who served as chair.
For Sr. Eva, medical care could not be separated from the conditions that made people sick. She described the mission as centered on “total human development.” Over the years, FOLPM introduced scholarship programs, enabling children from low-income families to continue their education. It organized feeding initiatives to address malnutrition in urban poor communities. It established day care centers to support early childhood development. It also launched micro-lending programs, giving families small but critical resources to start or sustain livelihoods.
OUR LADY OF PEACE HOSPITAL
Each intervention addressed a different aspect of the same reality: poverty was not only an economic condition, but a health condition. In 1992, she helped establish the Our Lady of Peace Hospital in Parañaque, located within the Bahay Pangarap complex. The hospital, initially equipped with 100 beds, was envisioned as a facility to serve economically disadvantaged patients who might otherwise lack access to hospital care.
Its construction was made possible through a combination of local and international support. Her siblings, based in the United States, helped raise funds, alongside benefactors such as businessman and former ambassador Alfonso Yuchengco, with the support of Fr. Reuter. Yet even as the foundation expanded, Sr. Eva continued to return to communities beyond the city.
After the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, thousands of Aeta families were displaced. Entire communities lost not only their homes, but also their means of livelihood. Relocation sites offered temporary shelter, but rebuilding a sustainable life required more than relocation.
In the mountains of Zambales, Sr. Eva helped establish a community enclave where displaced Aeta families could begin again. The site would later be known as the Aeta Resettlement and Rehabilitation Center in Subic.
The approach was consistent with her broader philosophy: restore capacity, not dependency. Families were given land to cultivate crops and raise animals. They were provided with pigs and chickens. They were also given tilapia fingerlings, which they raised in fish pens. Once harvested, the fish were sold at the local market, where the municipal government of Subic provided space for them to sell their produce.
The Foundation complemented these efforts by establishing a day care center soon after the eruption. This was followed by the construction of an elementary school, and later, a high school.
By 2014, the Foundation’s reach had grown significantly. It was feeding children in 12 centers across slum communities in Metro Manila. Each year, it supported an average of 120 scholars. Its scholarship programs extended beyond the capital, with beneficiaries in Leyte and among Aeta communities in Pampanga.
Across decades, Sr. Eva and her collaborators trained a total of 229 barefoot doctors from 118 Indigenous communities across the Philippines. These community health workers became the first line of care in areas where formal medical services remained out of reach.
ALL OVER THE COUNTRY
She also mobilized approximately 300 volunteer doctors, nurses, and dentists to participate in medical missions across the country. “We went all over the country,” she said in a 2014 interview. “We usually stayed in a place for a week at a time, by invitation, and conducted free surgeries.”
Her explanation for this work remained grounded in the same observation she had made early in her career: “People in these areas die without ever seeing a doctor or a nurse because they are so remote.” It was not only a statement of fact, but a justification for the model she had spent decades building.
At the center of her work was a theology that was neither abstract nor rhetorical. “We do not convert,” she said. “We simply allow God to do the conversion. It is hard to speak about God to people who are hungry, sick, and homeless. They have to feel God through those who are more fortunate.”
Her faith was not argued. It was practiced in clinics without walls, in classrooms built from necessity, in communities learning to care for themselves.
Sr. Eva Fidela Maamo died in April 2026 at the age of 85. She was a recipient of the Ramon Magsaysay Award–often regarded as Asia’s Nobel Prize–as well as other honors, including the Mother Teresa Award of the Philippines in 1992.
But the scale of her work is perhaps best measured not by recognition, but by continuity: in the barefoot doctors still serving their communities, in the families who found stability, and in the systems that remained long after she had moved on. Her life made a case not in words, but in work.
