They hail from different countries. They believe that love is everything. They are foreign missionaries, and they spend a large part of their lives working for disadvantaged people on the island.
In the morning sunshine, St. Anne's Home, located at the end of Chung-shan North Road in Taipei City, looks especially peaceful. A young Chinese man walks through its court. He is stopped and asked where Sister Petronelly Koulers can be found. The simper on his face indicates that he is "different" from other people of his age. "Over there," he says in a nondescript way, motioning toward a nun with silver hair.
The young man says his name is Jack. Sister Petronelly, a seventy-six-year-old Catholic nun from the Netherlands, is practically his mother, and she has stayed in St. Anne's Home day and night for the past twenty-three years. "He was only eighteen months old when he was sent here by his parents twenty-two years ago," she says. "His father was a doctor, and mother a nurse. They came to pay for their child only once after sending the boy here. Then they just disappeared for good, and went to the States."
It was in this way that the mentally retarded child was abandoned--left in St. Anne's Home, a place of refuge for many souls forsaken by society. A Dutch priest who is now ill and has been hospitalized in Taiwan for years had the original idea to establish St. Anne's Home as an institution for children with mental and physical problems. He began serving in mainland China in 1946, but moved to Taiwan in 1951. On a trip back to his own country in 1972, he met with the then forty-nine-year-old Sister Petronelly, who had known him since she was a young girl. Sister Petronelly had had experience taking care of special children in the Nether lands for twenty-two years before coming to Taiwan, and she was asked to leave her hometown and start a similar home for disabled children in Taipei. The priest was given a definite "Yes!"--and the same year Sister Petronelly came to Taiwan, a place totally foreign to her at the time. Four years later, with donations from the Netherlands, St. Anne's Home was established.
At present, there are fifty-two residents of St. Anne's Home, but only about one third of the parents are paying for their children. Born with Down's syndrome, cerebral palsy, and other conditions, most of them have difficulty speaking and moving around. Jack is an exception. Now they are taken care of by three Catholic missionaries, along with some locally hired staff.
"When I first came here, people were very poor and didn't know what to do with these children. Many children were just left at the door," says the Dutch nun, pointing to the front gate of the home. On the second floor, where severely disabled children stay--in fact, many are adults who resemble children because their growth was stunted--she approaches a small human form with short-cropped hair. "She was abandoned at the door, and is now twenty years old. I don't know who her parents are," says Sister Petronelly, looking at the girl with compassion. "She is blind and mute. She eats everything--including her hair, so we must cut it short."
The nun recalls a time three years ago during which, in a single week, three babies--one week, two weeks, and one month old, respectively--were abandoned at St. Anne's Home on three separate days. "This really hurt me," she states kind of indignantly. "Their parents should've come in and talked to me. Don't just put the baby at the door. It's not a dog. It's a human life."
It takes great patience and energy to look after children, especially ill ones. However, in the eyes of Sister Petronelly, all human beings deserve to be loved. When asked why she chose to be a Catholic nun, she says she simply wanted to. "I had a boyfriend when I was young. But I wanted to do something special," she says laughingly. "So I just broke up with him and at the age of twenty-two went to a convent."
Such a decision has apparently brought no regrets to this nun, who has shown invariable concern for these unfortunate children--first in the Netherlands, and then in Taiwan--for a total of nearly fifty years. And the island has already become her home away from home. "People here are very nice. On weekends young people come to see the children and take some of them to the park in the neighborhood. Today, Taiwanese also donate money to us and help our kids go to school by providing financial support," she says, adding that at present seven kids from St. Anne's Home go to a special elementary school. "I like people here. Once in a while I go home to Holland, but I'm happy to come back here. My heart is in Taiwan."
Having lived in Pingtung (southern Taiwan) for thirty years, Sister Maria Isabel Elizari from Spain sets another example of long-term dedication to Christian social work. "Originally I had planned to go to Africa instead of Taiwan, which I was quite unfamiliar with at the time," explains Sister Isabel from the Catholic Church's Dominican Sisters of the Rosary. "But the organization I belong to said I was needed in Taiwan. You know, one of the three vows we nuns take is obedience--so I came."
At first, Sister Isabel, now fifty-six, served in a small obstetrics clinic and the orphanage next to it, both of which were founded by the Catholic Church. However, as Taiwan's medical services improved, the clinic, with only about ten beds, was closed down in 1985 because it appeared too small in comparison with emerging big hospitals. Then the orphanage for girls stopped operating, too; but both institutions had assisted many people when Taiwan was not as advanced as it is today. "I found my life was quite meaningful when looking after those helpless girls. They looked to me as their mother, and today I still feel close to them," the nun smiles. "They are all grownups now. Once in a while they come back to see me, and during Chinese New Year we get together--like a family reunion."
Today there are still many things for Sister Isabel to take care of. Through friends and acquaintances, she has been trying to find people in need of help, such as the elderly and the sick. Sister Isabel also goes to hospitals to comfort patients, and pays home visits to counsel people in despair. "If the distance is not more than twenty kilometers, I ride a scooter. Otherwise, I drive to the destination," says the nun. "I just go where people need help. It's that simple."
Sister Isabel has been teaching the inmates of a prison in Pingtung City once a week since 1985, when the obstetrics clinic was closed down. Four years ago she also began to play the role of counselor in the drug detox clinic within the prison. Today, she goes to the prison every Wednesday morning to see prisoners, and every Wednesday afternoon to see drug addicts.
Over the years, Sister Isabel has counseled so many people in the Pingtung prison that she is sometimes greeted unexpectedly in the streets by them. "If someone offers me a seat on the train, I know it must be one of them. Other people are less likely to do me this favor." When this happens, the nun asks, "Where did we first meet each other?"--a question usually followed by knowing laughs from both sides.
Sister Isabel visits the ex-convicts after they are released from prison, too. "I go see them to find out how they are doing, and whether they have found a job," she explains, conceding that some still revert to their old ways of life and are sent to prison again.
"In fact, the inmates all have a good nature. Many have committed crimes because of the bad social environment around them," says the nun solicitously. She feels that drug-related problems are increasingly serious and should draw the most attention from Taiwan's society. "You know, every two weeks more than one hundred drug addicts from Kaohsiung and Pingtung alone are sent to the detox clinic here. So, what's the future of Taiwan?"
While she worries about future generations of islanders, Sister Isabel likes Taiwan more and more--especially Pingtung, where she has stayed for decades. "People here are really nice. Every time I leave Pingtung, I feel anxious to come back." When will she retire? The Spanish nun answers jokingly, "Not until I have an accident on my scooter"--which means she will work as long as she can. In any event, Sister Isabel wants to move back to Spain when she is ill and unable to work anymore. "In northern Spain our organization has set up an institution especially for retired and ill nuns from abroad. I'll go there to be taken care of with other nuns. I don't want to trouble people here just because a nun is sick, but I'm sure to keep in touch with my friends in Taiwan. Certainly I will miss them after I return to my country."
A missionary belonging to The Evangelical Alliance Mission ( TEAM) who recently returned to her hometown of Santa Barbara, California, Kathryn Merrill also has many friends and "daughters" on the island. "When I was a little girl, my parents helped support a girl in an orphanage in Shanghai operated by the Door of Hope Mission, and when I was praying for the orphanage, I felt God was leading me to do orphanage work," says Merrill, sixty-five, who was a teacher in the States before coming to Taiwan. "And I like children. I like to teach children. So I was very interested in this kind of work."
The Door of Hope Mission was established in 1901 in Shanghai as a faith mission for rescue work among poverty-stricken, homeless Chinese girls and children. In 1954, four years after leaving Shanghai because of the Communist revolution, the organization established the Door of Hope Mission in Taipei and began to take in girls in dire circumstances. Four years later, TEAM took over the home and changed its name to Door of Hope Children's Refuge. Most of the girls were not orphans, but they usually came from impoverished, single -parent homes. Merrill joined in 1960 to help and began studying Mandarin in preparation for her service in the young girls' home. "When I came to Taiwan, I felt this was going to be my life's work. I didn't plan to go to any other country," she explains.
When Merrill first served in the home, there were about 110 girls living in it. "I tried to learn their names and talk to them in Mandarin," she laughs, taking out a bundle of photo albums, fixing on one particular picture. "This was the first day of school in 1963 for our girls," she says, pointing at a photo of students traipsing off to school. "And this is the dining room where they did homework and had chapel services every night." Merrill herself becomes the picture of fulfillment as she reminisces over the many pictures taken to record the growing experiences of her spiritual daughters, who were literally fed and clothed by her and other missionaries over the many years. "Now the oldest girl to have lived in the home is over fifty, and the youngest about thirty-two. Many of them have married, and their children call me Grandma."
Times have changed. The Door of Hope Children's Refuge closed in 1977 because, according to Merrill, it was increasingly difficult to find staff. "Also, by that time Taiwan had started some social service programs to help the needy. In the 1950s, there was no help like that," she says. That same year Merrill's father died, so she went back to the States to take care of her mother. Eight years later, this unmarried missionary came back to Taiwan and in 1987, at the site of the original refuge, set up a center as a meeting place for girls who had grown up at the Door of Hope.
But doesn't she want to get married and have a family? "As an evangelical, I can get married. But God has not provided anybody for me," she laughs. "Anyway, this is not an issue at all, since God has given me so many daughters. They're my family." Merrill today is still in touch with over 170 girls in Taiwan and about sixty in a total of eleven other countries. Some girls keep sowing the seeds of love by sponsoring children in poor countries, to give back what they were given. One of them has become Merrill's co-worker at the center she set up in 1987.
"It's been a very positive experience for me," says Merrill, referring to her life on the island. But it is time for her to go back to the States, because TEAM encourages its missionaries to go back to their home countries "before they get too old," to readjust to life there. "I'll rent an apartment back in the States. And I can help in the English-speaking and Chinese churches, in both of which I have many friends," she notes. "But I still want to keep in touch with my friends in Taiwan. I'll visit them again, someday in the future."
Most foreign missionaries who have stayed on the island for a long time can speak Mandarin well, and some can understand Taiwanese, too. But can any of them use aboriginal languages? Quite few--but Father Weber Anton Josef of the Catholic organization Divine Word Missionaries is an exception.
This facility with tribal languages seems quite natural to anyone who knows this priest from southern Germany. He has lived in Taiwan for thirty-four years, and spent much time with the island's indigenous people--mainly the Tsou people in the mountainous area of Chiayi County, southern Taiwan. "My organiza tion said missionaries were needed in Taiwan at the time, and I felt like coming here, too." So Father Weber came to Taiwan in 1965 at the age of twenty-eight, ready to follow an old German priest who had served in Gansu, mainland China, and to minister in the poorly developed rural townships in Mount Ali in Chiayi County.
"Life was rather simple then, but the transportation was very inconvenient," the priest recalls. First, if he wanted to travel from Chiayi City to the mountainous area, he had to spend four hours riding the mountain train. And then it could take one or two hours to walk from the train station to the villages. "However, when you got used to the trip, it was really nothing," adds Father Weber, who served in the mountains for sixteen years, and is now serving in Chiayi City.
During the thirty-two years the priest worked for the welfare of indigenous people (his first two years were spent in Hsinchu in a language institute for foreign missionaries learning Mandarin), he not only helped estab lish credit unions--financial institutions in aboriginal villages which, among other things, have encouraged indigenous people to develop the habit of saving money--but also cooperated with the public sector in projects meant to better their living environment. In the late 1980s, Father Weber took over the position of director of a student dormitory in Chiayi City exclusively for teenage aborigines studying in a neighboring Catholic school. At present, there are about 120 students living in the dorm. Some who have financial problems are sponsored by the Divine Word Missionaries.
Equally impressive is Father Weber's effort to help preserve indigenous cultures through his research on the Tsou language at a time when the government still followed a policy of promoting only Mandarin. "The Tsou language is very beautiful. But while old Tsou people can still speak their mother tongue, their next generation is less and less familiar with it, often talking to their parents in Mandarin," bemoans Father Weber, who can preach in both Mandarin and Tsou.
But it is hard to preserve indigenous languages that do not have their own written characters. In view of this, the priest began to use the Roman alphabet to represent the Tsou language. He then cooperated with a linguist from Hungary who now teaches at Providence University in Taichung County, central Taiwan, compil ing a Tsou-German dictionary. With information provided by the priest, the scholar has also finished a disser tation on this aboriginal language.
"I hope the younger generation of the Tsou tribe will be able not only to speak, but to write their mother tongue," says the priest-teacher, who once taught classes in which Tsou people learned how to write their language. Fortunately, in recent years the ROC government has begun to encourage people to protect the island's aboriginal languages. But Father Weber's concern about the future of the Tsou language is especially impressive in that he began his efforts to protect Taiwan's indigenous cultures earlier than the government did. In a way, this foreign missionary seems more "Taiwanese" than most people on the island.
Another foreign priest from the Alps is Father Luis Gutheinz, sixty-five, an Austrian who grew up in a small village where all the residents were Catholic. "When I was around fifteen, I felt an intimate call asking me to be a priest," he notes. Then, upon hearing a young Catholic leader say, "Now everybody pray for the Christians being oppressed in China," at a gathering in October 1952, Father Luis again felt an inner voice. "Asia had always been attractive to me--especially China. I don't exactly know why. Then, at that moment, God finally gave me an answer, and I became rather clear about my choice. I decided to go to China."
So Taiwan as a Chinese society was Father Luis's destination. After traveling on the sea for five weeks in 1961, he arrived in East Asia. He still remembers the first time he saw crowds of Chinese people when the ship he had taken to Taiwan stopped in Hong Kong. "I thought to myself, 'Yes. I like it. My choice is absolutely right,'" he recalls with visible excitement. "Then I came to Keelung [northeastern Taiwan]. You know, I'd long lived in the Alps. So when I saw broad expanses of water, I felt so great," says the Jesuit priest.
Indeed, Father Luis, who is now teaching theology at Fu Jen Catholic University in Taipei County, easily impresses one with his stamina. He has already scaled Mount Jade eighteen times--an impressive feat, consid ering it is the loftiest mountain on the island, at nearly 4,000 meters high. But his undying enthusiasm is best revealed in what he has done for Taiwan's lepers, a group of people ostracized and marginalized by most of the rest of society.
Father Luis had never thought about taking care of lepers, until one day an old Italian priest told him that a young priest was needed to help out at Le Sheng Sanatorium, a leprosarium in Taipei County. Father Luis still remembers the day he went to Le Sheng with the old priest on September 21, 1975. In this, his first contact with lepers, he admits to having been shocked--especially when he visited a secluded area where patients suffered from leprosy and mental illness at the same time. The experience was so distressing that after return ing to the church that day he cried and prayed before God, unable to eat anything. "I told the Lord that being tortured by one of those two diseases would be terrible enough. Why were there people tortured by both? That's too much," recalls the priest.
Father Luis mentions another reason for his decision to serve lepers: originally, his younger sister was ready to become a nun and go to Korea to take care of lepers there; but their mother's sudden death made her choose to stay at home to take care of the family. Thus, when he saw lepers in Le Sheng, the priest thought of his sister, and had the idea to fulfill her unrequited vocation.
In the past twenty-four years, Le Sheng Sanatorium has been a major concern of Father Luis. He has cooperated with Presbyterians and Buddhists in improving the residents' lives by providing financial as well as spiritual assistance. He celebrates Mass in a chapel within the leprosarium every Sunday too, and regularly makes the rounds of the wards, which due to the presence of disease and suffering are usually enveloped in an atmosphere of heaviness and sorrow. The patients are all elderly, and most of them lose at least part of their arms or legs to leprosy. The average person is very likely to avoid them, even though treated lepers do not infect people; but the priest likes to talk to these patients and show his concern for their comfort. He just gets close to them, pats them on the back, and gently holds their hands. To him, they are friends for life.
The challenge Father Luis faces is that, with the lapse of time, these old companions pass away one after another, and today the number of patients is just over four hundred--down from about seven hundred when Father Luis first came to the sanatorium. On the other hand, the reduction in the number of those afflicted indicates that new cases of leprosy are rarely seen. But this is one Austrian priest who will never stop working for lepers. A couple of years ago, he went to southern mainland China to visit some leprosariums, and then started to solicit donations for the hundreds of thousands of lepers across the Taiwan Strait. Another mission, another tough goal in life. Apparently, for Father Luis, there is no end to love.