A group of graduates of the 1986 class of Our Lady of Lourdes Secondary School for Girls in Mankon, Cameroon, arrived in Dublin on Wednesday afternoon to visit the Holy Rosary Sisters who taught them as teenagers in the school.
Sr Mary Neville, who turns 90 years old next month and was principal of the school from 1981 until 1985, greeted the 21 students who made the trip from several countries including the UK, the United States, Cameroon, Norway and Switzerland.
Donning matching T-shirts branded with the school logo and their class name – “the pacesetters”, there was an emotional reunion between the students who had not seen each other in years and their former teachers, some of whom they had not seen since they graduated.
Dr Claire Minang, a pharmacist in Houston, Texas, took the lead role in organising the pacesetters’ visit to Dublin.
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“[The sisters] made us understand that we are enough as women in a world where it’s very masculine, and especially in Africa, where girls are even looked at less than the boys even more so. But they made us understand that we are up to, that we are important and we are enough,” Dr Minang said at the airport.
“We’re so very grateful because it made us who we are. We got the self-confidence, we knew that we could be whatever we wanted because they gave us that and that’s why today we are also taking up space in the global stage in different careers, we have doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacy, you name it, we got it.”
Dr Minang added that the women were taught how to walk with their head up high, in a literal sense, but also in a figurative sense.
Sr Mary was emotional meeting her former students, but said she had been anxious beforehand, because she wanted “to get everything ready” and “everything right”.
Many students have been able to take their parents to the US and got them treatment for different conditions, she added, with one former student and her sister having moved their parents to the US, and then having brought them back home to Cameroon to be buried when they died.
She used to teach them to be equal to the boys, she said, adding that she had been “very strong on that”.
“The culture is that the woman is dominated by the man, that the man was the boss and it’s cultural,” Sr Mary said.
“The girls have that self-worth which I think is so important, they are children of God the same as the men.”
Sr Mary O’Shea, who also taught at the school, referred to the former students as “great craic altogether,” and wondered if they would be in the airport for the night celebrating the reunion.
However, she said that in her time teaching at the school in Cameroon, where she lived for 38 years, she had “got a lot more than [she] gave”.
“They really prepared us and gave us very strong values, which has helped me even today in making decisions about my life, what I’m going to do with my life and how I conduct myself in business and also my personal life as well,” another former student, Marie Mondoa McMoli, who flew in from Washington DC, said.
Gwendylene Tanyi, another student who studied under the sisters and had made the trip from the US, said the group represented “thousands of kids” who had been taught in the school.
Ms Tanyi sent her daughter to the school in Cameroon from the US: “That’s how much trust and faith we have in the sisters,” she said.
“They were strict, let’s be clear, they were very strict and at that time we didn’t understand why tough love was necessary,” she added, saying that the students had come to appreciate how they had been nurtured in the school.
“[Sr Mary] was a mother. She wasn’t just a principal, she was a mother because we knew we had left our moms at home but we had another mother at school,” Dr Minang said.
The students will join Sr Mary Neville and the Sisters of the Holy Rosary on Friday for a full-day programme which includes a 90th birthday celebration for Sr Mary Neville and Sr Angela Morgan.
