Sister Eva Fidela Maamo, SPC, MD, was born on September 17, 1940, in the town of Liloan, one of four towns in Panaon Island, Southern Leyte, Philippines. It was a typical, small provincial town, with only three main streets. Liloan was surrounded by water and Sister Eva’s house was just across the street from the beach. Recalling her childhood in Liloan, Sister Eva says that the sea was very much a part of her childhood: "We enjoyed the breeze, the sea so much. When I was in high school, I would jump first into the sea and swim. Then I would bathe and go to school."

Her father, Simeon Maamo Sr., was from a barrio nine kilometers from Liloan. Her mother, Carmen Cagasan, was from Pintuyan, another barrio on the tip of the island. They met during a fiesta, fell in love, and got married.

Typical of the time, Sister Eva’s family was large. She was the fifth of eleven children, eight girls and three boys, each one born virtually every other year.

The family was close. Their house had a balcony facing the sea. On evenings after supper, the family would play music together. One sister would play the piano, a brother the violin, one sister would sing, and everybody else joined in or danced. It was a family ritual. Later, when her father was a busy politician and often on the road or attending to official business, he would make it a point to come home for this joyful family activity.

Perhaps it was in this familial atmosphere of give and take, caring, consideration, and sacrifice that Sister Eva first developed a sense and love for community life. In incidents presaging her future as a nun, Sister Eva recalls how all her brothers and sisters would stroll down the town’s street together, laughing; the townspeople would enjoy gawking at the entire Maamo family out for a walk.

It was Sister Eva’s father who insisted that the family remain close to each other through the years. One of the things he did to ensure this was to buy a house in Cebu when, one by one, the children began to leave home to study in the big city.

Simeon Maamo was apparently the center of the Maamo family and the strongest influence on his eleven children. He was a businessman and entrepreneur in his early years and later became a popular mayor of Liloan. It was he who instilled a deep and disciplined religious devotion in the children. At mealtimes, he insisted that the family be at home to pray and eat together. In the afternoons, the family would pray the Angelus together; in the evenings, they would pray again before going to bed. Years later, when his children were young adults and visiting at home, Simeon would stir from sleep at dawn and wake them all up to pray the rosary. Sister Eva recalls that even when the rest of the family dozed off while praying, her father would continue praying.

Self discipline was expected of everyone in the Maamo home. All the children had tasks. They had to wash their own clothes, even when there were servants. Sister Eva recalls that none of the children had to be told what to do. Each one simply pitched in when there was something to be done.

It was perhaps from her father that the Maamo children developed a sense of commitment to service. Her father, a charismatic man, had been elected mayor in 1932 when he was only twenty-five years old. "During that first election," narrates Sister Eva, "my father was sick. He was in Cebu, so he was not able to campaign. But the people campaigned for him and, when he won, he was brought home to Liloan. He was still weak, so he was brought back sitting on a chair. They went directly to the church. There he felt that a light touched him and made him strong. He was able to walk right away, and he started working."

As a government official, Sister Eva’s father never turned away people in need. He had a reputation for integrity, respectability, and incorruptibility. So it seemed that the people wanted to keep him mayor forever. But a mayor’s term was limited, requiring that he stand for election over and over again. This was an expensive process. As a little girl, Sister Eva remembers seeing her father crying during a political convention. By this time, there were eleven Maamo children and her father was having a hard time sending all the children to school. Money for his family was scarce. One Christmas, when neighborhood children sang carols at their house, her mother had to slip out the back way to borrow money from neighbors to give the carolers. So he asked the people if he could be spared from running for public office. "But the people cried," says Sister Eva. "You do not have to spend your money," they told her father. "We will spend for the election."

Because he had to augment his family income, Mayor Maamo learned to be an entrepreneur as well and engaged in various small-town economic activities. During World War II, he built a small banca (wooden boat) so that he could engage in the buying and selling of salted fish and abaca cloth in Surigao, in Mindanao. In Surigao, he would buy lumber and load it on his boat to bring back to Liloan. There he would bid for construction work such as bridges and roads.

In 1948, the elder Maamo founded a private high school, the Saint Ignatius Loyola Academy. He had realized that in their town, only the children of the well-to-do could go to school, or children of the Chinese families with businesses in town. He began by using the first floor of their house as a classroom and later built a schoolhouse on a vacant lot next to their house. All the Maamo children attended this school.

To Sister Eva’s father, education was a priority. Even when money was hard to come by, he told his children, "I will try to send you all to college. I do not want anyone to stop schooling. But you have to promise that you will study and use your time properly. Don’t be going around spending money because I will not give you extra."

Sister Eva’s mother also contributed to the family income. She sold rice cakes and sewed clothes and later, when Eva was about six years old, she opened a drugstore on the first floor of their house. But Carmen Maamo curtailed many of her outside activities when one of her young daughters died suddenly while under the care of a servant. After that she devoted most of her time to caring for the children, "because we were so many," says Eva. She did manage to keep the drugstore going, however, since it was conveniently located at home.

Eva studied at the local government public school, the Liloan Elementary School, and then entered high school at the family’s Saint Ignatius Loyola Academy. As school director, her father did not receive a salary. And although the school was owned by a corporation with stockholders and board members, it was also her father who borrowed money personally for repairs or purchases of school equipment such as microscopes. There were about four hundred students at Saint Ignatius when Sister Eva was enrolled there. She graduated as valedictorian in 1957.

The young Eva took up medical studies because she thought it would go well with the religious life, for which she felt stirrings even as a teenager. She took up Preparatory Medicine at the University of San Carlos in Cebu City, where she received good grades, and finished in two rather than three years by taking extra subjects during the regular school year and classes during the summer. For her medical studies, Maamo attended Velez College of Medicine (VCM), also in Cebu City. It was a small but reputable school with only about twenty-four students to a class. Sister Eva at first thought she would specialize in neurosurgery because she greatly admired her professor in the field, Dr. Benigno Aldana. But keeping in mind her dream of becoming a nun, she decided to go into general surgery instead, since, as a nun, she would be sent to far-flung missions and general surgery would be more in demand in such places.

Maamo studied hard at medical school. Often, after staying up late into the night, she would wake up in the morning with a fever. But she would pull herself out of bed and go to Mass anyway. Somehow she felt she had to begin her every day by attending Holy Mass.

Sister Eva developed many close friendships in VCM. Groups of girls would sleep over at the Maamo house in Cebu and they would cook together or swim together, or go to neighboring towns for the fiestas. Some friends even spent whole summers with the Maamos in Leyte. There, Sister Eva’s friends and her siblings’ friends all became part of the Maamo extended family.

For her internship, Maamo went to a different hospital almost monthly: the Cebu Community Hospital, the Cebu Tuberculosis Pavilion Hospital, the Southern Island Hospital, and the Chong Hua Hospital. In these hospitals, she was exposed to the whole range of illnesses that plagued Filipinos, especially poor Filipinos in both urban and rural areas.

In 1964, Maamo finished her internships and took the medical board examination in Manila. While waiting for the examination results, she worked as a medical resident at Trinity General Hospital. When the happy results came out, Eva’s proud father came to fetch her because he wanted her to practice medicine at home. Obedient to his wish, Eva did so for two years, opening a family clinic in Liloan with her brother, who was already a doctor, along with a sister who was a nurse and another sister, a pharmacist. On weekends, the Maamo family medical team would go to nearby barrios and hold clinic there. Both parents were extremely supportive and Eva’s father even bought her a Jeep. Her mother, looking haplessly at her drugstore records, would tease her saying, "I’m bankrupt because you have given away our medicines." Eva invariably answered: "If there are seriously ill patients, you cannot say ‘I cannot give you medicines.’ I would feel very guilty, especially because I am a doctor."

Simeon Maamo had a dream for his medically trained children. Seeing the family medical clinic, he thought the family could build a hospital right beside the house, just as earlier he had founded a school. Forthwith, he began gathering wood, hollow blocks, and other construction materials. One day, returning from a trip out of town, he discovered that Eva had used his construction materials to build a big grotto of the Virgin Mary. It was her way of letting the family know that she had chosen a religious life. Sister Eva recalls that her father did not say anything at all, having apparently understood her message and accepted God’s will for her.

Maamo’s decision was driven in part by a childhood promise. When she was just twelve years old, her mother fell ill and was unconscious for two weeks. Distraught, Maamo prayed: "Lord, if my mother survives, if she lives, I will enter the convent." Indeed, when she was sixteen, she applied to the Carmelite Order. But the Mother Superior persuaded her to go home and talk things over with her father. He advised her to finish her medical training first. But from that time on, Maamo felt that she had a vocation as a nun.

Thus it was that after two years of working in the Liloan family clinic, Maamo left to join the Sisters of Saint Paul of Chartres, a religious order founded in the fifteenth century in the small village of Chartres, France. In the Philippines, the Sisters of Saint Paul had several apostolates; they operated hospitals, schools, and pastoral houses and were also engaged in social work and mass media education.

Maamo regards the story of how she became a nun as a story of destiny, how events somehow arranged and rearranged themselves to enable her to answer God’s call. One option open to her was to go to the United States. In fact, in late 1969, one of her sisters came home from the United States with the express purpose of taking Maamo back there with her. But it was Christmastime and because of the fluctuating weather—cool at night, dry and humid in the daytime—it was also the season in the Philippines when pneumonia, bronchitis, and flu flare up, dangerous illnesses that afflicted Maamo’s patients. She was exhausted. "Go to our house in Cebu first," her father urged. "Rest there and I’ll come and fetch you in two days." It was a good opportunity for Eva to visit her mother, who at the time was confined at Cebu’s Perpetual Succor Hospital. In conversations with the nuns running the hospital, Carmen Maamo had told them about her daughter’s inclination to enter the convent, also telling them that the family was against it. Like many Filipino parents, Simeon and Carmen were hoping that Eva, as a doctor, would take care of them in their old age. When they hinted as much to her, she had always told them: "I have a brother who is a doctor. He can take care of you, too." But they had always replied, "You are a girl, and a girl takes care of parents differently from a boy."

One of the nuns who visited Maamo’s mother every day in the hospital urged Eva to apply to her congregation, Sisters of Saint Paul de Chartres. Demurring, Maamo said, "I am not prepared for the religious life." But she took the exam anyway and was soon called to the Assistant Provincial Superior’s office where she was asked only one thing: "You are a doctor. You have been used to giving orders. Do you think you can follow what the Sisters tell you? Many Sisters will tell you to do many things." On the spot, Maamo made her decision. She replied, "I cannot promise, but I will try my best." Without money and with no more than a small suitcase of clothes, Eva left immediately for Manila. She says her leave-taking was much like an elopement: mysterious, clandestine, and dramatic. "It happened so fast," she says. Maamo wrote to her parents and brothers and sisters: "Do not look for me. I am in safe hands. I will write you again in a few days’ time." Hurriedly boarding a cab, she met up with an anxious Sister Enriqueta, the Mother Superior, and dashed to the airport. She was twenty-nine.

"It was so hard to leave home," Maamo recalls. "That was the biggest cross I had to bear, to leave my family." Many times later, when she was in the convent, she would call to mind certain happy images of her childhood. "After supper in the evenings," she says, "we danced, we sang, we sat on the balcony facing the sea." And sometimes, afterwards, when they were sated with talking and joking and laughing, she and her brothers and sisters would all sleep together in a single room.

After arriving in Manila, Maamo was taken to the Saint Paul congregation’s mother house in Antipolo to undergo four years of "formation": first as a postulant for six months, then as a novice for two years, and then as a junior sister. "Formation" comprised both academic learning and spiritual development. With the other postulants, Maamo went to the Sisters Formation Institute and sat in classes to learn her congregation’s history and moral theology and even how to sing—"because nuns are always expected to know how to sing or chant their prayers." Proper behavior was also a subject, since nuns should know how to comport themselves, especially in public, where they are constantly under the gaze of ordinary people. Although she was already a doctor, as a new postulant, Maamo had to cook, do the laundry, and clean the toilets just like the others.

After a year, Maamo was scheduled to take her first vow—one year ahead of schedule. (Usually, novices take their vows after two years of training.) But she again expressed doubts about her readiness for the religious life. The Mother Superior, alluding to the Bible, replied: "Is anyone really prepared to untie the sandal of the Lord?" Because the Mother General of the Order was in the Philippines at that time, it was deemed an opportune time for the novices to take their vows: a promise to practice poverty, chastity, and obedience. These vows were especially difficult for a professional like Maamo. She knew that the vow of poverty, for example, did not only refer to a detachment from material things, but also implied a humbling of one’s spirit, a repression of one’s ego or individualism in the service of God and the religious community. At the practical level, the vow of poverty meant that everything had to be shared. If a gift was given to one sister, it was submitted to the superior to dispose of according to the needs of the others in the community. The request to buy things for one’s own use also had to be approved by superiors. Supplies for the sisters’ daily needs were kept in a cabinet to be shared by all; the sisters assumed that everyone would use only what she needed. Hence, everything was provided but nothing could be owned personally.

What was most difficult, especially for independent-minded professionals, was the vow of obedience: the submission of one’s will to an authority or organization. Even if one felt that one’s judgment or decision was the better one in some cases, the authority of the superior had to be followed.

Living in close quarters during this period of "formation," the sisters learned to be more tolerant of each other’s preferences, eccentricities, and flaws. Sister Eva cites the time when she was working in her congregation’s outreach clinic in Singalong, a neighborhood near the convent with many poor inhabitants, and was asked to extend her services to Smokey Mountain, a garbage dump site where people even poorer than those in her community lived. Her superior wanted to keep her in the Singalong clinic but made this known to her only through insinuation. Whenever Sister Eva asked for permission to go to Smokey Mountain, the Mother Superior answered, "Up to you, up to you," but in a tone that made her disapproval perfectly clear. This attitude "humbled me," Sister Eva recalls. She had to submit her will to the superior, who became increasingly distant and cold. Another sister deliberately offended Sister Eva at mealtimes by making snide comments about her medical work outside the convent. Later, when these two sisters fell ill, Sister Eva finally bonded with them as she nursed them back to health.

After three years of temporary vows, a novice sister finally takes her perpetual vows. Ordinarily this is a momentous step, but as Eva approached it in 1973, she says it did not feel momentous: "When I first stepped into that convent, I already considered myself a nun . . . whatever vow I had taken, temporary or perpetual. When I was younger, I felt that something was missing in my life, I felt a vacuum. When I entered the convent, that feeling went away." Four novices had started out together in 1970 to be religious sisters: a nurse, a pharmacist, a stewardess, and Maamo. Three now remained to take their perpetual vows.

Sister Eva’s formation as a nun ran parallel to her medical studies and practice. As a postulant, she accompanied the Mother Provincial on trips around the country and treated the sick nuns wherever they visited. After taking her temporary vows, she began a full-fledged medical residency in Manila at the Philippine General Hospital (PGH), a government facility. Maamo initially enrolled in cardiology but changed her mind. As she walked from Saint Paul’s convent to the hospital on her very first day, it occurred to her that if she were sent to the missions, she would have to be prepared for surgical cases. "It must be heartbreaking to see a patient and know you cannot do anything because you are not prepared for it," she thought. So Maamo asked the chair of the surgery department if she could train for surgery instead. Evidently, she already had a reputation for excellence in the hospital, for the chair replied, "Sure, Sister. You do not have to take the exam or be interviewed. Just scrub."

Sister Eva led an unconventional nun’s life during her residency at PGH. She lived in her congregation’s regional house with three other sisters, instead of at the main convent. There were days when she did not go to the convent at all. This distressed her superior, Sister Antoinette, to no end. Sister Antoinette expressed her anxiety to Maamo’s brother, a doctor. He answered: "Eva is trying to combine living the life of a nun and living the life of a doctor. You understand a nun’s life. But this time you should understand what a doctor’s life is, and especially working as a resident in a government hospital like PGH."

Life at the PGH was frenzied and hectic. Sister Eva recalls that she had to go from one operation to the next with hardly any rest in between. Sometimes, to catch up on their sleep, the residents would take to the floor of the operating room in between surgeries.

But Sister Eva missed her prayer life. So after a while, she says, "I would go home, maybe for only fifteen minutes, just to pray with my community." The congregation’s house was just across from the hospital, so she could quickly dash across. Sister Antoinette, who had come to understand Sister Eva’s erratic schedule, would now pretend to be aghast: "Why are you here? You are on duty! Go back! Go back!" But Sister Eva would say, "Sister, just a few minutes . . . I want to pray with you. Then I will go back." Early morning Mass always marked the beginning of her day. She would attend even if she had barely slept at all. Observing this, her congregation realized that Sister Eva was just as serious about her religious life as she was about being a good doctor.

Sister Eva established warm and caring friendships with the doctors and nurses at the government hospital. But ever vigilant about their novice’s vocation, her congregation expressed some anxiety that she (along with one other female doctor) was "with forty-two doctors, all male"—and they were all sleeping together in the same room. "We are like brothers and sisters," she told them, much like her big extended family back in Liloan. These were the same doctors she would be able to call on later to join her medical missions. Sheltered by her father and brothers, and innately shy, it was during her stint at PGH that Sister Eva "learned to deal with men," she says. Her father had been strict and extremely conservative in raising his daughters. Her exposure to a practically all-male workplace at the PGH helped her to deal with different kinds of men in her missions—the shy, the arrogant, the gregarious, the indifferent.

In the midst of her residency at the PGH, Sister Eva was sent to Mindanao. The director of the Santa Cruz Mission on Lake Sebu, Cotabato, Father Rex Mansman, had told her Superior a harrowing tale about the primitive state of health care in the Philippine hinterlands. His laundry woman had gone into labor; it was a difficult delivery. He could not get anyone to help, so he delivered the baby himself using a ladle as forceps. The baby lived but the woman bled to death. Father Rex, in utter frustration, said he would not go back to the mission unless he had a doctor with him. Sister Eva’s superior knew that sending her to Mindanao would mean an interruption in her residency. But there was desperate need. Showing Sister Eva a picture of the place and the community, her superior gently urged her to take the assignment. The congregation would try to open a new community in Lake Sebu, she said. Aghast, Sister Eva exclaimed: "Sister, those are forests. There are no houses!" However, seeing it as both a religious and a medical challenge, Sister Eva agreed to go. Her superior promised that she would be free to come back if she could not adjust to living there. So, interrupting her training at PGH, Sister Eva now departed for Lake Sebu. She stayed there for seven years.

Her trip to Lake Sebu would have daunted a lesser person, but it gave Sister Eva an idea of what lay ahead. On the appointed day, the group could not leave because there had been military operations against insurgents in the area. They bided their time until it was safe, then they flew to Davao, a major hub on the island of Mindanao. But in Davao the light plane that was supposed to take them to Surala, Cotabato, developed engine trouble, so the group had to wait again. When the group got to Surala, they were picked up by Father Rex in a decrepit weapons-carrier truck. They rode into the mountains in blinding rain. The trip took more than six hours over terrible roads. Sometimes the truck would get stuck in the mud and everyone had to get out and push it. They crossed seven rivers, sometimes in waste-high waters. They seemed to be traveling to the very ends of the earth and Sister Eva realized, with a sinking heart, that all of her medical supplies would have to pass the same tortuous route.

The Lake Sebu mission had been established by the Passionist Fathers twenty years before Sister Eva first arrived. She imagined that the clinic would already be set up when she arrived. To her dismay, what she found was a small cogon-and-bamboo hut that could accommodate only the most basic first-aid cases.

Like most poor people living in far-flung rural communities, the people of Lake Sebu suffered from the illnesses of poverty. Tuberculosis was a leading disease because of malnutrition and poor housing conditions; most local homes were simple one-room dwellings and this made it easy for communicable diseases such as TB to spread quickly. Even more common than TB, however, were pneumonia and bronchitis, especially among children and the elderly. Gastroenteritis and amebiasis were also common because local water sources were contaminated.

Before Sister Eva had even unpacked her things, she was called for urgent surgery—to remove from a local woman a ruptured ovarian cyst and her diseased appendix. Sister Eva now learned that the clinic did not possess even the most basic surgical instruments, such as clamps. She told Father Rex: "Father, I am only a doctor. I am not a miracle worker. What will I do? I have nothing." But rising above her feelings of helplessness, Sister Eva mobilized the mission team and improvised. The nurse-sister said, "We have five gloves on the ground floor of the house. I will look for them." Sister Adele, the superior, said, "I have a white bathrobe. I will iron it. That can be your sterile gown." They spent many precious minutes boiling the instruments, since the mission’s pressure cooker was not working. The surgery was done on the convent dining table under a mosquito net. There was only fifteen cubic centimeters of ordinary anesthesia and no spinal anesthesia at all. Sister Eva said a fervent prayer and plunged in; there was no alternative. Miraculously, the patient’s abdomen relaxed and allowed the operation to proceed successfully.

In hindsight, Sister Eva says she was glad that her first surgery happened the way it did. It prepared her for all that lay ahead. Confronting the consequences of years of medical deprivation and isolation, Sister Eva had to learn fast. Moreover, there was a dearth of everything. She had to be resolute. She had to be creative, self-reliant, and purposeful. Above all, she had to learn not to panic.

The Lake Sebu mission served seven tribes and Sister Eva herself lived with one of them, the T’bolis. Two other Saint Paul sisters also worked in the mission: Sister Adele, a teacher, and Sister Cecilia Lorayes, a nurse. As the mission grew, it eventually comprised a motley group of British and American (Peace Corps) volunteers as well as Ilonggos, Ilocanos, Visayans, and other Filipinos. There was already a small school there and an education program set up by Father Rex, who had also initiated some livelihood and agriculture projects.

One of the first things Sister Eva did was to ask the community to help her build a bigger clinic. Although the new clinic was still made of cogon and grass, it was larger than the previous one and had electricity, provided by a generator. When the generator failed during surgery, townspeople and volunteers held flashlights over her head so that she could see. When she was caught short of dextrose, she used coconut water as a substitute.

Sister Eva looks at her stint in Lake Sebu as a way by which God works among the poor and the marginalized. "I was only God’s instrument," she says. Despite having to perform surgery without such basic diagnostic tools as microscopes, x-rays, and other laboratory equipment, she says that her diagnoses virtually always proved to be correct. She would thank God, whispering: "Lord, it really is You, it is not me, after all."

Sister Eva was often forced to proceed on sheer skill, guts, and prayer. There was the day when, performing a cesarean section, she had to use her hands to stem the flow of blood. Or the day when there was no electricity and she could not cauterize a wound and had to suture it slowly and painstakingly by hand. Or the day when a patient went into shock and Sister Eva executed a tracheostomy only to discover there was no tracheostomy tube. She had to improvise by sterilizing and modifying a used urethral catheter. Or the day she operated on one of the Peace Corps volunteers in the area, who was suffering from a strangulated inguinal hernia. He trusted Sister Eva’s skills so much that he refused to go to the next town where there was better medical equipment. He was "a big man," Sister Eva recalls, and "longer than the bed." He was highly agitated and moved so much during the operation that the feet of the bed slipped through the bamboo-slat flooring. Sister Eva had to get down on the floor to finish the procedure.

Sister Eva knew that her work in the community did not only mean waiting for sick people to come to her little clinic. She knew that she must involve the entire community in health care: "Even if I treat hundreds of people day in and day out, what of it? Things would still be the same," she says. Her exposure to Lake Sebu’s poor hinterland community expanded Sister Eva’s perspective on medical care. She came to understand that medical practice should be viewed in terms of total human development.

So, along with providing medical treatment, Sister Eva conducted health education classes for the people. Becoming cognizant of the indigenous people’s beliefs and practices, she integrated these into her medical practice whenever she could. But sometimes she had to explain that some of their ideas and practices were actually injurious to health. And sometimes there were simple misunderstandings. Once, Sister Eva narrates, a man came to ask for an operation. He had been feeling ill. "Sister, please operate on me. I have appendicitis," the man said. "How do you know you have appendicitis?" Sister Eva asked. "You operated on my neighbor who had appendicitis. Please operate on me also."

To provide financial support for the mission’s clinic, Sister Eva set up a medical cooperative. In her scheme, people who used the clinic regularly would contribute a monthly sum for their health needs. Collectively, the founding members of the cooperative fixed this sum at fifty centavos a month per person. After the scheme had been in operation for a year, the members raised the contribution to one hundred centavos, or one peso. Surgeries were free, but people paid for their medicines using their account at the clinic. Sister Eva’s cooperative became a cornerstone of the clinic’s success and continued even after her departure.

By working with the region’s traditional healers, the arbularyo, rather than against them, Sister Eva gained the cooperation of these important people. She remembers one incident involving a fourth-grade pupil who had been bitten by a snake. He was brought to her already ashen gray, with dilated pupils, indicating an advanced stage of blood poisoning. Calling in the arbularyo to help her, Sister Eva let the arbularyo attend to the boy, whispering her prayers and applying saliva and herbs. Meanwhile, she herself bled the wound and organized a blood transfusion from one of the townspeople. After the crisis was over, the arbularyo proudly told Sister Eva, "See, the child lived because we both did it."

Aside from working with traditional healers, Sister Eva trained her own team of paramedics and "barefoot doctors." Living among the T’bolis, she learned their language. She is especially proud of three T’boli girls whom she trained: one had finished only grade six; another grade three; and one had not gone to school at all. They became a great help to her in her medical clinic and were able to perform certain simple surgeries and to suture wounds.

Sister Eva also trained midwives. Whenever deliveries were done at the clinic, she called them to observe the medically prescribed procedures. Because midwives used only bamboo to cut the umbilical cord, Sister Eva put together a kit of basic medical instruments for each midwife.

In a program that Sister Eva initiated, many of these paramedics and barefoot doctors became full-fledged community health workers (CHW). To launch it, she trudged from one rural community to the next, meeting with the people, listening to their problems, and discussing possible solutions with them. She would sometimes have to walk for six hours to visit tribal communities such as the Kalagans, Bilaans, T’bolis, Ubus, Manobos, and the Muslim Maguindanaos. Since a community health worker had to be someone who was respected locally, she consulted the whole community before choosing someone for training—especially the datu, or chieftain, who would be asked to attend the training sessions so that he could give comments and suggestions. Always, Sister Eva would let the people decide. After she described the training she had in mind, she asked, "Now, do you need a training like this?" "Yes, Sister." The villagers would then choose two people from each community who would undergo training in Sister Eva’s clinic. The whole community thus became committed to the training of its health workers. The people brought food for the trainees at the clinic. Since the trainees would have to leave their farms for some time, members of the community took turns working on the trainees’ farms.

In the beginning, Sister Eva observed that the CHW trainees were shy, meekly doing everything they were asked to do. However, as the training progressed, she observed a change: the trainees began to be more assertive, volunteering their opinions on medical practices and confidently defending decisions they took in the course of their training.

After three months, the trainees were sent back to their communities. Every month, the trainees would have to come back to the clinic for reporting, evaluation, and planning. They would proudly insist that Sister Eva see for herself the transformation they had been able to effect in their communities.

Working with limited local resources, Sister Eva became adept at drawing outside resources to her hinterland clinic and its programs. She accepted international volunteers, for example, about whom she has some amusing stories. Once, a British volunteer offered to be her assistant in surgery. But he was so nervous and clumsy during his first operation that his eyeglasses fell into the patient’s open stomach. Despite this lamentable incident, the patient recovered and the volunteer stayed on for two years.

She also solicited scholarships. The University of the Philippines in Tacloban City, for example, offered her several scholarships for trainees in midwifery, nursing, and medicine. The scholars were granted not only free tuition, but money for housing, books, and clothing as well. She also called upon philanthropic organizations in Manila and around the world for help. For example, Philippine Business for Social Progress (PBSP), a nongovernmental organization (NGO) based in Manila, provided funds to improve the mission’s water system. And Misereor, the German Catholic nongovernmental funding agency, paid for the construction of a larger and better-equipped clinic with thirty beds and a proper operating room, much like a small hospital.

Sister Eva’s "total community development" approach based upon well-trained community health workers paid off. After only a year, the number of patients coming to the clinic declined by one-third. Community health workers worked directly with families. Aside from first aid, they taught them proper sanitation and scientific agriculture. Paramedics supervised the community health workers. And only when the paramedics could not handle the more complex cases were patients taken to the clinic. Because health care and sanitation improved in the people’s villages, and because people now knew how to help each other, fewer people needed to go to Sister Eva’s clinic. (Even so, Sister Eva and her staff sometimes had to place overflowing patients in the corridors of the clinic or in nearby tents.)

And there were other benefits. During fiestas, the region’s once disparate and isolated tribal communities now ate together and presented joint cultural performances, linked by their participation in Sister Eva’s programs and by their common aspirations for a better life.

The grateful people around Lake Sebu responded to Sister Eva’s work with touching gestures. Aside from gifts of animals and vegetables, they brought ancient gongs and other tribal heirlooms as payment for the clinic’s services. Instead of taking these precious objects, Sister Eva accepted them temporarily as "collateral," so that people could retrieve them later without losing face. Assessing her own work in Mindanao, Sister Eva said, "The people were empowered, they recovered their dignity. And they helped their own people."

In the midst of her missionary work in Mindanao in 1976, Sister Eva was called back to Manila to take her perpetual vows. She underwent a four-month "enclosure" in the congregation’s mother house in Antipolo. The enclosure meant time for meditation for Sister Eva—time to reflect on her life’s mission and purpose, to see her role in the context of her congregation’s apostolate. A touching ceremony was held after the period of enclosure. Sister Eva felt it was like taking a marriage vow, as indeed it truly was. The evening before, reflecting on the momentous step she was to take, Sister Eva realized, "yes, it is forever." After the ceremony, Sister Eva rushed back to Mindanao and continued her work.

After several years, the Santa Cruz Mission grew into a vibrant, self-reliant community with its own "people’s health care system." But there were heavy military anti-insurgency operations in the area. Sister Eva did not generally work in areas where there was fighting but because she was training communities for self-reliance in health care, she was suspected by politicians and the military of being "friendly" to the insurgents. "What do you teach these people? Why do you train these people?" they would ask pointedly. Sometimes politicians and military officers were downright insulting: "Why do you bother with these people? Their IQs are very low."

In 1981, Sister Eva reflected deeply on the work she had accomplished and concluded that it was time to leave. She had set up the training programs, and these now could be left to run on their own. And she had trained more than sixty community health workers, achieving a ratio of one health worker to ten families. Although no one from Sister Eva’s religious order could replace her, she had established contacts with doctors and nurses from the nearby towns, and even in Manila, who could be called upon to do volunteer work at the mission. The clinic itself, newly expanded thanks to the Misereor grant, had two full-time nurses (one of whom was also a nun), several paramedics and midwives, and a laboratory technician.

Sister Eva did not return directly to Manila. Her congregation thought that she might have "reentry" problems, a kind of culture shock at the highly urbanized and fast-paced life of metropolitan Manila after the Mindanao hinterlands Thus, as a kind of transition, she was assigned to the quaint Visayan harbor town of Iloilo for several months. Then, back in Manila, she was assigned to Saint Paul’s and to two major hospitals: PGH, where she had trained during her surgery residency, and Medical Center Manila, a private hospital. As she plunged again into the busy life of an urban doctor, she also prepared for her board examination in surgery. When she passed the examination in 1984, her congregation assigned her to the charity clinic it operated in Singalong, Manila.

Sister Eva’s work among the squatter and poor communities around Singalong was essentially a continuation of her work in Lake Sebu, not purely spiritual or medical but involving comprehensive community improvement. The Singalong clinic had been run by the Sisters of Saint Paul since the 1920s. It was a simple health center that dispensed medicines and first aid. By assigning Sister Eva there, however, the congregation sought to improve dramatically the basic medical services in the area. Her arrival set off a chain reaction. Almost immediately, she set up an operating room. When the Manila Doctors Hospital learned about this, it began sending medical residents to help out on a rotating basis. And when the parish priest of nearby Saint Anthony’s Church heard about it, he asked Sister Eva to set up a health program for the entire parish. Soon the congregation began sending its novices and junior sisters to the health clinic for "exposure," to give them hands-on experience in helping the sick not only with their medical requirements but with their spiritual and emotional needs as well. The female students of Saint Paul College came as outreach volunteers.

Sister Eva’s Singalong clinic had a big impact on the people in the neighborhood. To express their gratitude, they brought food for a shared meal after liturgical services; even those who had nothing to share felt free to come and partake of the meal. This is how Sister Eva’s "outreach programs" began. She started a feeding program when she saw so many severely malnourished children in the neighborhood. Her program did not give dole-outs, but required parents to participate. She organized the mothers to attend nutrition classes and to take turns preparing menus, buying and preparing food, and caring for the children. Noticing that a great many of the children were just playing in the streets because they were too poor to go to school, Sister Eva started a scholarship program. She also launched a livelihood program based on the microcredit system and a Christian values-formation program. She had often heard young people complain. "We come from broken homes," they said. "Our parents are often out. We have no one. So we turn to our peer group, our barkada." In response, Sister Eva set up "recollection" and prayer days when parents and their teenaged children could dialogue with each other. Married couples also received counseling.

After a year of working in the Singalong clinic, Sister Eva was sent to Hong Kong for training in 1985. There she divided her time between three Catholic hospitals: Saint Theresa’s and Saint Paul’s, both owned and run by her congregation, and Caritas Hospital. When she returned to Manila, she went back to Saint Paul College and to her work at the Singalong clinic. The sisters also asked Sister Eva to help out in their outreach clinic in Smokey Mountain, then Manila’s largest dump site covering twenty hectares, where thousands of destitute families lived by scavenging for plastics and other recyclable items to sell to junk dealers. In Smokey Mountain it was common for people to get sick and die without ever having seen a doctor. Sister Eva now received patients in the Smokey Mountain clinic, did minor surgery in her operating room in Singalong, and performed major operations at nearby Manila Doctors Hospital.

Sister Eva was doing all this in the midst of considerable national turmoil in the Philippines. The year 1986 marked the end of the long dictatorship of President Ferdinand Marcos. In February, he was overthrown in a popular uprising often called the People Power or EDSA Revolution (named after Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, where much of the action occurred) and inspired by Corazon Aquino, who ran and won against Marcos in the snap presidential election in January. Aquino was subsequently sworn in as president and led a democratic restoration. The years leading up to this momentous event were years of intense critical inquiry. Concerned Filipino citizens from many sectors—business, the academe, the Church, labor—held "study groups" to discuss the national situation. Most of these discussions were held secretly because anyone perceived as being critical of the Marcos regime came under the watchful eyes of the military. Moreover, anyone who worked and organized among the poor was immediately suspect. This included Father James B. Reuter, a prominent Jesuit and one of Sister Eva’s key supporters, as well as nuns from Sister Eva’s own congregation, some of whom had to go into hiding to avoid a military "invitation"—a euphemism for military detention.

Sister Eva was in Hong Kong for most of 1985, but she had returned to Manila by the time of the election and the EDSA uprising early the following year. Of this event she has powerful memories. She recalls, in particular, how the religious responded to Jaime Cardinal Sin’s call for people to assemble near the military camps along EDSA, where military rebels who had defected to Aquino’s side were making their stand. The idea was that if thousands of human bodies could be amassed in the surrounding areas, a military assault by forces loyal to Marcos could be thwarted. A medical team was urgently needed in the area because multitudes of people had already begun to congregate there. Sister Eva’s superior, unsure about the unfolding events, asked the sisters to stay in the convent and "just pray."

By his time, however, Sister Eva had already rushed to EDSA where she entered the rebel stronghold at Camp Crame. Later, because she was a nun, she was asked to go to the exposed areas where people were vulnerable to military assault. Presumably the presence of nuns there would deter any violence against the people by Marcos’s military forces. Her group of nuns was shunted from one area to another, wherever there was a sensitive spot. "I was with old, old priests and nuns and with very young ones too. Where had they come from so suddenly?" It seemed as though every religious person from the convents had come out to fight the dictatorship. "We were holding hands and standing eyeball to eyeball with the soldiers," she says, "then we made a circle, holding hands, encircling the soldiers whom we were entreating to change allegiance from the Marcos to the rebels’ side." There were entire families there—grandparents, parents, even small children and infants that fathers hoisted on their shoulders so that they could witness the historic events. People had brought newspapers to sleep on and food to share. Sister Eva set up a first-aid center and stayed at EDSA for two straight days.

Following the EDSA Revolution, Sister Eva’s activities quickly spread from Singalong and Smokey Mountain to other areas of the city and the country. Someone suggested to her that she set up her own foundation to help fund and coordinate her proliferating activities. Sister Eva quickly saw the benefits of this, although, at first, her Mother Superior did not. Soon, however, all doubts were put to rest and she formed the Our Lady of Peace Foundation in commemoration of the peaceful uprising at EDSA. In those troubled times, she says, she especially wanted to emphasize peace. She invited Father Reuter to be one of the founding board members. The foundation’s basic philosophy is a belief in the inherent right of the poor to be healthy, to survive with dignity, and to receive basic health services from society.

As people learned about Sister Eva’s success in Singalong and Smokey Mountain, they began to ask her to set up similar programs in other parts of Metro Manila. One group wanted to set up a "total human development program" in Cubao, for example. Another group needed her help in Navotas. Then, the Benedictine and the Holy Spirit sisters asked her to help them organize community programs in their areas. And so on. She tried to help everyone. After Holy Mass early each morning, she would rush from one site to another. In each community, it was slow and painstaking work. First, she would get acquainted with the people themselves and then with the recognized community leaders, then began a long process of consultation. Finding the right people was crucial. Sister Eva helped each community identify someone who could serve as general coordinator; then, individual program coordinators and area coordinators were chosen to run the feeding program, the scholarship program, the medical program, and so on. Most of the participants were volunteers.

Organizing a community always began with a needs assessment. This was a long process in which people assessed their situation realistically and articulated possible solutions. In the beginning, Sister Eva noted, people turned to the foundation for most of their needs. "We are poor, we have no money" were constant complaints. So one of the first programs to be launched in any new community was a livelihood program. For example, sewing machines would be provided through a realistic credit scheme. Livelihood programs are essential, according to Sister Eva, so that "the poor can help themselves. So that the children’s parents can be workers and not beggars. So that people can live with dignity even under a bridge."

In Manila, malnourished street children are a ubiquitous sight. So, Sister Eva made feeding programs a central part of her foundation’s outreach work. Soon, hundreds of children were wending their way daily through the small alleys of their Metro Manila neighborhoods to feeding centers run by Sister Eva’s volunteer mothers—in Leveriza, Malate, Singalong, Puting Bato, Santa Ana, Makati, Las Piñas, Santa Mesa, Navotas, and other sites. For many, it was "their only nourishing meal of the day." Sister Eusebia, SPC, in charge of the Malate feeding center, beams as the children embrace her and say, "Lola Madre (Grandma Nun), we love you!"

Father Reuter says, "We are feeding malnourished squatter children, under six years old. We feed them once a day, Monday through Friday. Some social workers, with high-powered academic degrees, object to this. They say that this is a ‘dole out.’ It is. But it is also the best investment in all this world. At the end of six years, these children are still there, walking around, talking, smiling, laughing. Many would have been retarded from malnutrition, or handicapped. Now they are normal children. At our level, this is a superlative."

In Sister Eva’s food programs, volunteer mothers organized themselves, purchased their own food, and assigned each other tasks. The feeding programs usually evolved into day-care centers, as the mothers themselves realized that the program must be a continuing one. Values formation, not strictly religious practices and rituals, became an important component of each program. People in the community soon began to work for their own empowerment, seeking their own solutions to their own problems. Even the salaries of teachers and trainers were often shouldered by the people themselves.

Father Reuter considers the foundation’s education program "the light at the end of the tunnel." Because Sister Eva and her team believe that children must be prepared to survive and compete in the "real schools," the program is designed as a kind of preparatory stage for poor children to enter regular schools eventually. Father Reuter says, "It is not easy. If you have a seven year old who has never been to school, who cannot read or write, and you put him in a regular school, he will be afraid, ashamed. The program gives these children special lessons in private first, until they are properly prepared." Father Reuter continues, "If we can get the children into real schools, and keep them there—this will ultimately solve the national problem." They have no illusions, however. "It will probably take a couple of hundred years, but we know this is the answer."

Although there is a strong spiritual component ("values formation") in Sister Eva’s outreach programs, there are no rules or requirements. Anyone can avail of the services. Most especially, there are no expectations regarding religious practice. "We do not ask the mothers if they are married," says Father Reuter. "We do not ask the children if they are baptized. If you ask this, the poor mother feels that she must marry or you will not feed her baby. They become ‘rice Christians’." As Father Reuter explains, "Many of the patients are not married because they have no shoes. They do not go to church because they have no decent dress. They have no money to put in the collection. So the children are not registered with the government. We are dealing with a civilization which, legally, does not exist."

As in her work in Mindanao, Sister Eva was able to mobilize individuals and business establishments in Manila to support her foundation’s programs. Hotels contributed food and took charge of feeding programs. Other businesses gave school uniforms. Often, the people in the community themselves began to express confidence in their program, saying, "Sister, even when you leave, we can carry on."

It was in the midst of all these endeavors in Manila that Sister Eva also began organizing medical missions to poverty-stricken rural areas of the Philippines. The idea began with her brother, Simeon Jr., a rural doctor, who told her that many surgical cases could not be brought to urban hospitals simply because it was too expensive to do so. He invited her to come and perform surgery in the rural areas. This led to her first medical mission. Sister Eva recruited a medical team of twelve people, but she did not have enough money to pay for their flights from Manila to Negros. She approached the Jesuits, who gave her ten thousand pesos. She solicited donations of medicine from schools and drug companies and got them. Still without enough money, however, she became audacious. She asked the Philippine Army for a plane to fly her team but, at the last minute, was told that no plane was available. She then phoned the wife of erstwhile defense minister Juan Ponce Enrile, who was an alumna of Saint Paul College. Mrs. Enrile is alleged to have said, "Sister, do you expect me to do a miracle—to produce a plane in three days?" Sister Eva told her firmly, "If God wants it, he can do it. But you have to be his agent, his instrument." Mrs. Enrile later offered their family’s private plane and Sister Eva and her team were soon bound for Tacloban, from whence they traveled by land to the rural areas. That was the first of many medical missions providing free medical, surgical, and dental services to indigent people in the countryside.

Volunteer doctors, nurses and dentists, funded by generous sponsors and donors, have now enabled these medical missions to be repeated year after year. Sister Eva calls them "missions of love and mercy," reiterating the philosophy that has inspired all of her work. They are "a celebration of life and joy," she says. Calling her volunteers "the bearers of hope," she likes to speak of the long hours each one contributes for five long days—the usual length of a mission—working at three or four tables, side-by-side in a makeshift operating room. "I am filled with awe and often marvel at their generosity and capacity to give," she says. "They not only serve the poor and sick . . . they also climb mountains unmindful of the heat and rain to bring God’s love, mercy, and compassion to the poor."

The request for medical assistance usually originates from a diocese of the Catholic Church somewhere in the Philippines. In cooperation with the bishop, local officials, and civic volunteers, the foundation puts together a medical mission team. For many years, Ambassador Alfonso Yuchengco, business tycoon and the Philippines’ former permanent representative to the United Nations, supported the missions through his AY Foundation. In recent years, free air transportation, medicines, and other forms of assistance have also been provided by the Armed Forces of the Philippines, the Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO), the Philippine Amusement and Games Corporation (PAGCOR), the Organization of the Sovereign Knights of Malta in the Philippines, and other donors.

A typical medical mission includes about twenty surgeons, two dentists, five anesthesiologists, and six nurses. The team conducts marathon consultations and surgery, at times not finishing until two o’clock in the morning. Typical surgical cases involve hernias, abdominal and thyroid growths and tumors, cataracts, and harelips. Some people treated by the teams suffer from hideous, debilitating conditions such as, in one case, a goiter so swollen that it hung to the waistline. In one typical mission, a surgical team of thirty-three volunteers from the Manila Doctors Hospital, Philippine General Hospital, Philippine Heart Center, Makati Medical Center, and East Avenue Medical Center performed nearly 250 operations in five days in Surigao. Similarly, twenty physicians and six nurses from the Manila Doctors Hospital saw more than two thousand patients and performed over nine hundred operations during their five-day mission to Sorsogon, one of the poorest provinces in the country. Indeed most of the missions serve very poor communities. In some, many people are so poor that they cannot afford the tricycle ride to the mission site. Most have never seen a doctor.

By the tenth year of the program in 1996, Sister Eva had organized twenty-six surgical missions, eleven dental missions, and thirty-eight medical missions involving a total of 40,700 medical consultations, 1,976 major surgeries, and 1,569 minor surgeries, ranging throughout the various islands and provinces of the Philippines: Negros, Palawan, Romblon, Sorsogon, Bohol, Quezon, Samar, Mountain Province, Quezon Province, Aklan, Zambales, Bukidnon, Ilocos Sur, South Cotabato, and Mindoro. In the years since, the number of missions has grown to thirty-eight surgical missions and forty-eight medical and dental missions, involving 181,000 medical consultations and nearly 9,000 major and minor surgeries. They have reached the far corners of the country, including contested Muslim areas and Sister Eva’s own hometown of Liloan, Southern Leyte. Today, more than two hundred volunteer doctors and medical practitioners stand ready to join them.

The doctors who have joined Sister Eva’s missions realize they are being helped by the missions too. As Dr. Roehl Salvador, a surgeon, says, "I was still a very young resident when I first joined the mission in 1992. The more missions I joined the more it dawned on me that my efforts have been so minimal . . . that there’s still so much more to be done, countless people to help through our medical service. This is the moving spirit behind our volunteer work."

Others have learned generosity and caring. Dr. Jeanette Silao, another surgeon, says: "Why did I join the mission? I wanted to be surrounded by people who can teach me compassion, empathy, and self denial through their example. I wanted to be guided by people who live by the golden rule," referring to the selfless attitude she saw in other volunteer doctors.

Dr. Rolando Baria, a plastic surgeon who has joined several missions, says, "The more missions I joined, the better I felt. It is about sharing and giving love. Joining the mission is now a pledge and a conviction."

When Mount Pinatubo erupted across the central Luzon plains in 1991, bringing tragedy to hundreds of Aeta tribal families, Sister Eva’s foundation was immediately able to respond using its resources and expertise to the maximum. A long-range program of rehabilitation was launched for the displaced Aeta families on a twenty-three-hectare forestland in Barangay Sacatihan, Gala, in Subic, Zambales. Some eighty families were relocated there. First, basic needs such as food, shelter, and medical assistance were provided. The foundation gathered lowlanders and Aeta families together and built access roads, houses, and the essential water pump. Livelihood projects were undertaken, focusing on communal farming and handicrafts.

Because community building was an important component of the rehabilitation program, a community center was constructed where people could gather together and discuss common problems and solutions. A nurse stayed for some time to attend to the regular health needs of the people, while the foundation sent medical missions whenever the need arose. With funding from Jesuit scholastics, the foundation bought an additional thirty-three hectares of forestland to accommodate more families in the resettlement area. Later, the Department of the Environment and Natural Resources donated an additional seven hectares to the official resettlement site in return for Sister Eva’s assistance in organizing and developing the farmer communities in adjacent areas. A day-care center was set up under the supervision of Saint Paul’s College of Education, followed by a complete elementary school and literacy program supported by the Department of Education. Lessons in self-help, leadership, and community organization were also organized. All of these measures were designed to promote self-help and self-reliance, which Sister Eva considers the most essential elements of her program.

A generous and consistent donor to Sister Eva’s foundation, Ambassador Yuchengco one day asked her to accompany him in his helicopter to examine the devastation around Mount Pinatubo. Seeing what Sister Eva was doing in the area, he made a huge private donation. Elfren Cruz, the head of the Presidential Management Staff under President Aquino, set up a budget for Sister Eva’s work in the Aeta resettlement area, especially to fund the water system and a livelihood program.

Similar humanitarian programs were organized by Sister Eva in missions to Baguio City in the Mountain Province, which suffered a terrible earthquake in 1990, and to Ormoc City in central Leyte, which was devastated by floods the following year. In 2003, Sister Eva and her team organized urgent medical assistance to victims of landslides on Panaon Island and sent truckloads of food and supplies from Manila. Sister Eva was able to respond to these crises because she had an established network through which resources from the national government, local governments, and private institutions could be orchestrated.

The rewards of serving the poor are immeasurable, as Sister Eva knows. "It is never a one-way traffic . . . we actually receive more than we give, enriching our own lives with a sense of fulfillment and joy of service. There is a lesson in every experience of poverty. From the poor we learn humility, simplicity, sincerity."

Sister Eva sums up her life’s work this way: "Poverty calls for holistic healing. It is a disease that afflicts the totality of a human being. We can rid a person of his sickness, but if we do not help him secure a means of livelihood, he will not be able to feed himself, and before long, he will get sick again."

Of her foundation’s work, she says, "Each person has a mission for the poor. The people behind our foundation are from all walks of life, from the top-rate surgeon to the housewife volunteer. For as long as there is one sick body, one hungry stomach, one empty mind, or one troubled heart, our world cannot be the world God has intended it to be: a world of love, a world of peace, and a world of sharing."

For many years, Sister Eva nurtured a dream. It was a dream about a hospital for the poor in Manila, a hospital with modern facilities and excellent doctors and nurses in which people with modest means would receive medical care at affordable prices and in which the truly indigent would be treated for free. As Father Reuter said, "The [foundation’s] clinics are there to keep the poor alive, the hospital will be there to allow babies to be born safely; the sick to get back to normal; the old and the poor to die with dignity."

On August 15, 2002, Sister Eva Fidela Maamo, founder and president of Our Lady of Peace Mission Foundation, inaugurated the Our Lady of Peace Hospital on the outskirts of Manila. She says: "All of the Foundation’s programs have been aimed at achieving the total human development of the people we help. And we regard this hospital as our new point of entry for evangelization."

As Sister Eva reminds us, "The fight against poverty is also a fight against time and distance. For every poor person we try to help, there are a hundred more who remain beyond our reach. We need to add more hours to our working time, more hands to our workplace, more miles to our journeys, and more pesos to our coffers.

"Surely this is a huge task for our small foundation," she says. "But this is not just a task for saints, nuns, and priests. It is a task for all of us."

Cynthia Nograles-Lumbera

REFERENCES

Maamo, Sister Eva Fidela. "Awardee’s Response." Speech delivered at the presentation ceremony on receiving the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Community Leadership, Cultural Center, Manila, August 31, 1997.

_________. "Fighting a Deadly Disease Called Poverty." Paper presented at the Awardee’s Forum, Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila, September 2, 1997.

_________. Interview by James R. Rush. Transcript of tape recording. Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila, September 3, 1997.

Our Lady of Peace Mission Foundation. Accomplishment Report, 1996. Manila: Our Lady of Peace Mission Foundation, 1996.

Various interviews and correspondence with individuals familiar with Sister Eva Fidela Maamo and her work; other primary documents including newsletters of the Our Lady of Peace Mission Foundation.