Pictured, first row from left, are Anna Felice, Sr. Mark Felice MD, Deacon Mike and John Pedro; in the second row, from left, are Carolyn Felice, Cathy Pedro (sister), Richard Pedro, James Felice and Mark Felice (brother).
Serious thought of a religious vocation was far from my mind until I was 24 years old, and I attended a parish mission at our church. The priest that gave it impressed me very much. I could see that he was someone who had given his whole life to God, and that nothing was more important to him than serving God and the Church.
There was also a certain peace about him. During a time for adoration during that mission, I told God of my admiration for that priest, and I asked to have in my life some of whatever it was I saw in that priest. In response, I felt like God was inviting me to do what that priest had done, to give him everything in living a religious vocation. I was surprised by that response and I’m not sure I even welcomed it, but I couldn’t deny how real it seemed and the peace that the idea brought.
The subsequent months were a battle for me between things that attracted me in the world, and wanting to follow the example of that priest. What helped me make the decision was finding a book in the back of our church, The Way of Divine Love, describing Christ’s apparitions to a Sister in the 1920’s. In it Christ describes his deep love for us in the Eucharist, and explains what he desires of those who live a religious vocation, a total and deep commitment.
Before finishing the book, I felt like my decision was made. I couldn’t give my life for something light or watered down, but to a deep and demanding commitment, I could. The book helped me see the worldly things that had held me back as distractions from something much more important.
I had already been accepted into medical school and I never thought about not going. I started to look at different religious orders during medical school and I met the Daughters of Charity while doing some rotations at Lourdes Hospital, in Binghamton, and things fell into place. I lived with our Sisters while I did my residency in Primary Care Internal Medicine through the University of Rochester, and I entered our community after finishing my residency.
After finishing our seminary (novitiate), I worked in the Outreach department at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Bridgeport, Conn. and subsequently as a hospitalist at St. Mary’s Hospital in Troy, N.Y.
From the very beginning, I felt like God was calling me to do missionary work, but in our community we must be a Sister for 10 years before doing so. So when I was 10 years vocation, I made the request and was sent to our Missionary Center at our Motherhouse in France to study French and Tropical Medicine. During that time I was informed that I would be sent to our Province of the Congo where I have been for nine years now.
Our community, the Daughters of Charity has 16,700 Sisters in 97 countries in the world. We have 90 Sisters in our Province of the Congo, and 13 houses. Two thirds of our Sisters in the Congo are native Congolese vocations and the others are missionary from various countries in the world. In the Congo I have worked in an HIV treatment program and at a General Reference Hospital, where I am now, in Lukolela, located on the Congo River.
Our community is responsible for a 120-bed reference hospital for an area of 15,000 km squared, a population of 147,000. The people in general are very poor, with most living in houses made of mud or clay bricks with palm branch roofs, dirt floors, and no running water or electricity. The population struggles to meet the basic needs of life – food, education, healthcare and housing. Most people make their living by cultivating the land or fishing. Our community also has a school in Lukolela.
When a person is sick in a rural village in the Congo, it is recommended that they go to a health post or health center in their village and if their problem is more serious, they are referred to a reference hospital like ours. Often people delay coming because they are poor and because they may have to travel a long distance, and thus they come to us in an advanced state.
Our hospital has all the usual departments: emergency services, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, surgery, pediatrics, and intensive care.
We do not have the capability to do x-rays but can do ultrasounds. We have a basic lab that helps us, especially in diagnosing the tropical diseases common to our area.
The common diagnosis that we see are malaria and anemia, secondary to the hemolysis (rupture of red blood cells) caused by malaria, typhoid, tuberculosis, HIV, filariasis, trypanosomiasis, amebiasis, and malnutrition. Our hospital is equipped to do basic operations – appendectomies, hernia operations, and cesarean sections. We also do a significant number of laparotomies and bowel repairs or resections for bowel perforations secondary to typhoid.
The charisim (focus) of our community, the Daughters of Charity is “the service of Christ in the poor”. At our hospital we try to provide the best treatment possible for the people, at the lowest cost possible.
On the other side of the coin, we need to charge enough to offer a reasonable salary to our employees. The reality is that patients often struggle to pay their bill, and many leave without paying. Salaries are often very low in the Congo. A nurse often makes around a hundred dollars a month. Because of the low salaries, professionals (nurses, teachers, police), after work, must go work in a field to grow their own food, in order to survive, thus their lives are not easy.
People often ask me if I am happy there and why. I tell them that I am happy, because I feel like I’m doing what is God’s will for me. They ask me what I have learned from living there – I have given up trying to make sense of the extreme poverty that I see each day, but by being in such situations that are beyond my understanding, I’ve learned the importance of relying on God’s grace moment to moment and have come to know and trust more in his deep love for each of us. Also I have learned many things from the people there. I have learned from their joy despite their poverty and from their closeness, trust and reliance on God in the midst of it. The people in Lukolela rarely have television or radio, but they sing and dance very spontaneously themselves.
Lastly, people sometimes ask me what I think is most important or what counsel I would give to others based on what I have learned thus far in my life. I think that in order to make progress in life, we must take time for prayer each day, to hear what God is saying to each of us in the depths of our hearts. If we do so, we will act according to his will, and not by our own ideas or strength, and we can be confident.
If we are making a mistake, he will gently let us know. In this life we must always be willing to carry our cross (to accept suffering that comes as a part of life as the part that each of us plays in Christ’s redemption of the world), but we must do so relying on God’s grace moment to moment and confident in God’s deep love for each of us. These things are important no matter what stage of life we are at.
