A little something to Honor Hermana Maura Clarke

Hermana Maura Clarke was the founder of the organization I work for here in Nicaragua called Centro Educativo y Capaitacion Integral de La Hermana Maura Clarke.
Here is an except from Wikipedia.org



"Maura Clarke (January 13, 1931 – December 2, 1980) was an American Roman Catholic Maryknoll nun and missionary to Nicaragua and El Salvador. She worked with the poor and the refugees in Central America from 1959 until her death in 1980. She was beaten, raped, and murdered, along with fellow missionaries Ita Ford, Jean Donovan and Dorothy Kazel in El Salvador, by members of a military death squad.

Maura Clarke was born in Queens, New York on January 13, 1931. She graduated from Stella Maris High School in Rockaway Park, New York in 1949. She joined the Maryknoll Sisters of St. Dominic in 1950 at the age of nineteen. Soon thereafter, she became a teacher and taught first grade at St. Anthony of Padua school in Bronx, New York. In 1959, she relocated to Siuna, Nicaragua, a gold mining town. Here, Clarke worked to help the poverty-stricken mining families. She then worked with the poor elsewhere in Nicaragua, and aided those who were devastated by the 1972 Nicaragua earthquake. She stayed in Nicaragua for seventeen years.[1]

In 1980, Clarke responded to the request made by Archbishop Oscar Romero for help in El Salvador. She worked in Chalatenango, El Salvador with fellow Maryknoll sister Ita Ford, at the parish of the Church of San Juan Bautista, providing food, transportation and other assistance to war refugees of the Salvadoran Civil War.

Currently, there is a junior high school in the Rockaway peninsula name Maura Clarke Junior High School, in her honor. Also, Maura Clarke High School and its founding organisation CECIM (Centro Educative Hermana Maura Clarke) in Ciudad Sandino, Nicaragua are named in her commemoration."

She was apparently an remarkable woman who served the poor. My host mother took my to work my first day at CECIM and when we approached the statue of Hermana Maura she began to cry. My host mom, Doña Maura Otero worked with the late sister here in Ciudad Sandino building upa dn restoring the community after the earthquake in 1972 thta destroyed so much. It was touching, and to know my host mom is a part of Nicaragua´s history is amazing.