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Sister Theresa Baldini, M.M. in the Sudan. Picture from page 168 of Another Day in Paradise
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In calm, matter-of-fact prose, Sister Theresa Baldini, a Contemplative Maryknoll Sister, describes what it is like to live and work in Southern Sudan with a people under the siege of sectarian warfare for more than two decades. Her first-person account is one of fifteen selected for inclusion in Another Day in Paradise: International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, a new book to be published by Orbis Books in October. Editor Carol Bergman, a journalist and writing instructor at New York University, sought out these workers and encouraged them to tell about their lives and their work under what novelist John le Carré calls in his Foreword "the foulest conditions that man and nature can dream up between them."
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Sister Theresa Baldini, M.M. (r) with co-worker Sister Madeline McHugh, M.M.
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A native of Brooklyn, New York, Sister Theresa and her co-worker, Sister Madeline McHugh, have spent nearly a decade trying, as she says, "to provide respite for the people displaced by the war between the Islamic North and the mostly Christian South." Despite hardships, bombings, and with no end to the violence in sight, Sister Theresa writes, "The will to survive among the Sudanese is strong. They build their homes from scratch, they plant and harvest, they raise their children . . . . Life goes on, despite the war. Suffering is transformed, and we share a glimpse of love in simple moments." |
To read Sister Baldini's story