Photo By GEORGE SHUBA
Sister Maria Ann Singer of the Little Sisters of the Poor has devoted her life to serving the elderly in areas as diverse as the Congo, Alegeria and Malta. Serving elderly Native Americans on the fringe of a Navajo reservation in Gallup, N.M. has been among her ministries.
Sister Maria Ann Singer of the Little Sisters of the Poor has devoted her life to serving the elderly in areas as diverse as the Congo, Alegeria and Malta. Serving elderly Native Americans on the fringe of a Navajo reservation in Gallup, N.M. has been among her ministries.
Serving the world's elderly is life's calling
WARRENSVILLE HEIGHTS-When Sister Maria Ann Singer first went to work at the Little Sisters of the Poor Home on Richmond Road in 1979 to earn money for college tuition, little did she know that she would find it would lead her to a religious vocation and missionary work to the elderly poor at the ends of the earth.
“At that time I had absolutely no thought that the Lord might be calling me to the consecrated life, but I fell immediately in love with the residents and began to think of nursing or gerontology as a career,” she said.
However, the Lord’s call to this career did not include joining the congregation until 1987 when this second youngest of five children joined the Little Sisters of the Poor from St. Dominic Parish, Shaker Heights.
Her work has taken her not only throughout the United States but to the far reaches of France, Algeria, Malta and the Congo and then back to the sister’s home for the elderly on the fringe of a Navajo reservation in Gallup, N.M.
Sister Singer’s missionary life has had many rewards.
“My vocation is a privilege and a great joy to serve Jesus in the elderly poor,” she said. “Caring for these people enables me to develop relationships in the best way possible. There’s a ripple effect, too, because if you can make one person happier by enhancing their quality of life, you also touch their families and the others around them and the staff as well.”
But that privilege has not come at an easy price. While serving in the congregation’s home in the Congo for nine years, she contracted malaria several times, at one time bringing her close to death’s door.
During those same nine years the Congo was engulfed in tribal civil war. In 1997, the sisters’ home in the center of the city of Brazzaville was caught in the crossfire. French soldiers urged the sisters to evacuate but without their elderly residents. They refused and stayed fast, living with bullets flying and bombings all around for hours on end, both day and night.
“The dangers were very real, but we survived and this experience taught me something about fidelity,” Sister Singer said. “Whether in a big way such as this or in the small hiddenness of each day, faithfulness is the only true way to show our love.”
Sister Singer, who speaks many of the languages learned in the countries where she served, said that her missionary experience, taught her that every culture is a gift to every other. “That which unites us is much weightier than that which divides us if only we know how to look.”
Sister Singer returned to the United States in 2000 to become a registered nurse at Harper College in Chicago and to be near her elderly mother, Nancy Gibbons, who is a resident at the nursing home the order runs in Warrensville Heights. She visits often while her mother struggles with health issues.
In between those visits, Sister Singer is director of nursing at the sisters’ home for the elderly in St. Louis, Missouri.
Still, Sister Singer’s heart is with missionary work. When she was young, the sight of the clouds moving across the sky fascinated her, and she knew that was a call to move like them beyond the horizon. To where, she wasn’t sure.
“I believe that was my earliest call to the religious and missionary life,” she said. ”Ultimately, I would like to return to work as a foreign missionary. Our foundress, Blessed Jeanne Jugan, used to say, ‘Never forget the poor are our Lord.’ It is my great joy and privilege to serve Jesus in the elderly poor. It is important work. I see Christ in them.”
Klima is a freelance writer.
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