Menotti’s folder also holds another photograph, one of her surrounded by smiling children. It was taken in Tanzania, where she traveled in 2007 with Roberta Hesse, another nun from Texas who spent almost four decades in Africa, to start a grassroots school and convent.
“I volunteered to go to Tanzania because I wanted to work with our sisters from Rwanda,” Menotti wrote in an e-mail. “I enjoyed the outdoor work to establish a new community there. … I also felt that God was calling me to do that.”
Before the school could be built, Menotti said, several old buildings had to be torn down. With a lot of help from others, the nuns helped clear the property.
“We could not have done it by ourselves,” Menotti said. “We did a lot of work in six months. I was 77.”
There was no running water, “not even a pump” at the school’s location when she arrived, Menotti said, and “the roads were real bad, especially after a rain.” She and the other sisters stayed in a rented house while the school was being built.
Menotti said she sanded cabinets and refurbished furniture for the school, learned some Swahili, and made friends with the locals.
“We were good and friendly with the people,” she said. “I had a camera. You know how children love to get their picture taken.”
She also set up a laptop and talked online with her sister. When she returned to Texas, the laptop stayed at the school.
“That was their start,” she said. “They’re getting pretty fancy now.”
Menotti said some of the children who had lived in the shacks on the property that were torn down now attend the school, which has about 200 students.
“I still communicate with the sisters and some of the people there,” she said. “They are all in my daily prayers.”
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What an interesting and inspiring story of life.