This story appears in the Rwanda feature series. View the full series.

by Melanie Lidman

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Four Kenyan sisters from the Little Daughters of St. Joseph Congregation run the Muyanza Health Center for the Byomba Diocese, but the missionary sisters are providing more than just health care. Seeing them as a rock of support for the community, residents have begun to accept the sisters into the fabric of their lives. In a country that is trying to outrun the shadow of its own history, trust can be the most precious commodity. And trust is something the sisters are slowly nurturing, despite their outsider status, as residents of Muyanza begin to reveal the terrible things they witnessed.

Helen Cahill is a Dominican Sister of Peace who earned both her master of theological studies degree and doctor of ministry degree from Catholic Theological Union. Cahill's ministry includes workshops and retreat facilitation as well as group supervision for religious community formators, and she does spiritual direction on FaceTime and Skype. 

I grew up in a home where Dad was an organizer, so we grew up expecting everything to be in order. Dad's workbench had a chalked outline for each tool, arranged from the smallest hammer or screwdriver to the largest. Before we could read, we would line up our Tinker Toy rods by size, shortest to longest. Our building blocks likewise were automatically sorted into small, medium and large.

"When a country is at war, there's no such thing as a safe place," said Fadi Ali, a Syrian refugee currently living with Handmaids of the Sacred Heart of Jesus sisters in Buenos Aires. The sisters sponsored him and his family through the Foundation of the Argentine Catholic Commission on Migration in 2015. To Ali, the sisters who took him in are "the best followers" of Jesus, and those who believe in whatever God they want, whatever prophet they want, must consider what those prophets would do today, he said.