How our story in Patna, India, unfolded
This is how our story in Patna, India, began one Christmas Eve, as told by Sister Mary Laetitia in the Medical Missionary magazine in 1942. Her handwritten account can be seen opposite and first appeared in the Patna Chronicle.
Arrival - Christmas Eve - 1939. It is about ten o’clock at night when an exasperatingly slow train, already a half-hour late, puffs and chugs its way into the station. Amidst a load of boxes, paper bags and suitcases, two Medical Missionaries step out to be greeted by the Most Reverend Bernard Sullivan, S.J., the Bishop of Patna. Almost immediately His Excellency gets down to business with the urgent invitation, “Come right along, Sisters. A poor family is expecting you. They have been waiting all day long to see you.”
Wonderingly the sisters follow him, until the Bishop unlocks the door of the Patna Cathedral where the “poor family" - Mary, Joseph and the Little Infant Jesus in the Crib, have been waiting all the day long to say, ‘Welcome to Patna”.
That was in December, 1939. For our two pioneers, arrival in Patna meant a “start from scratch.” But “start” they did! Within a few months they had equipped and in working order a small twelve-bed hospital which all too soon proved inadequate. A move to larger quarters was inevitable, so the Bishop came to the rescue with the loan of the long-abandoned Old Patna Cathedral and its historic compound. Here, in ‘“Padyri-Ki-Haveli”’ (Garden of the Fathers), among the tombstones and headstones of what is described in a travel book as “‘the oldest cemetery of the Roman Catholics at Patna, built by the Dutch in 1772,” they undertook to transform the Old Cathedral and its surroundings into suitable buildings for a hospital, nurses’ home and convent. Second class bricks, mud plaster, and several coats of whitewash - all combined to effect the transformation. The result - a hospital of twenty beds, later “stretched” out of sheer necessity to thirty-eight!
By the end of the first year, there were recorded: 4,715 dispensary patients; 536 hospital admissions; 236 operations; 55 confinements; and 50 baptisms. It is no wonder, then, that Sister Mary Laetitia, the superior, writes enthusiastically of hopes and plans for a larger hospital which would include, besides all the wards found in any modern American hospital, a section for lepers also. By November 1958 from a cramped, family-style hospital, the Medical Mission Sisters had moved to a new bigger more complex modern Holy Family Hospital at Kurji (KHFH) which they continue to run today in a unique partnership with the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth (SCN).
Another first in the State of Bihar was the inauguration on September 1, 2011 of Kurji Holy Family Hospital College of Nursing in Patna.
This Christmas, we are delighted to report that earlier this year, three women, who might not otherwise have been given an opportunity to study a nursing and midwifery qualification, were given scholarships to do so by a US-based family foundation. Two of the newly enrolled students at MMS’ nursing college in Patna are from a Dalit background, the other student is from the indigenous Ranchi people. Dalit women are discriminated against three times over - on the grounds that they are poor, they are women and, in India’s caste system, they are Dalits. Lack of educational development and opportunities remain a significant problem for them.
We hope that the inclusion of these three women in MMS’ nursing and midwifery course will act as a model for other training establishments in India to follow - helping Dalit and other marginalised women to assert their rights to social and economic participation in India and demonstrating what has been called by our Society’s founder, Dr Anna Dengel, the mission approach that “intricately weaves science and religion, social analysis and spirituality …”
Upon completion of their studies, the three women look forward to applying their skills to better serve women in their own communities.