Doris L. Parker, a native of Malden, Massachusetts, spent over fourteen years as a nun, working a year in France and a year in Belgium. While in Antwerp she studied for the missions at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine. Her experiences as a nursing missionary in a remote village in Belgian Congo during the following three years are the subject of this book.
After leaving the convent in 1964, Ms. Parker lived in Chicago and became a Montessori preschool instructor, teaching for several years; she considered this method of education...properly followed...as preventive medicine. She became active in politics in Chicago, working for the election of independent candidates on all levels, and was among the crowds during the infamous 1968 Democratic National Convention. Her participation in the civil rights movement included joining marches, and tutoring in the housing project of Cabrini Green. As an activist in the peace movement, she edited a monthly antiwar newsletter for four years and organized protest marches.
She married M.S. Parker, a freelance artist, and although he passed on shortly after, their five years together were happy ones.
Ms. Parker presently lives in Fort Myers, Florida, with her two cats. She continues to work part-time for a typesetting company, and enjoys collecting quartz crystals and other semiprecious stones.
email: dorilou@sprintmail.com
Lumumba, the outstanding political leader in the eastern provinces and generally revered throughout the country, stirred people with inflammatory rhetoric, even from jail. Soldiers stationed in Stanleyville kept busy suppressing disturbances that sporadically broke out.
During this period of unrest, King Boudoin of Belgium journeyed to Stanleyville for a firsthand view of the situation. Some Congolese thought he had come to release Lumumba from prison while others feared he would have Lumumba executed. In either case, a wild excitement seized the city. When the king’s motorcade drove slowly through the streets, unruly mobs attempted to attack the monarch’s car. The king apparently saw enough firsthand and shortened his visit. Within a few weeks, official word came from the Belgian government announcing the precise date of independence: June 30, 1960. Lumumba’s release from prison soon followed.
When the Congolese began speaking openly of independence after the first riots, they initially seemed to understand it in simple terms of freedom from white domination. Over the months since then, stories circulated clouding and confusing the issue. Rumor had it that independence would not only eliminated white control, it included many other benefits: everyone would have plenty of food to eat and unending supplies of beer; they would live in white peoples’ houses, and the men could take white women. With all this floating about, independence totally lost reality of meaning to the ordinary local people.
Sister Mary Rose assumed that the Congolese would receive the news of a date for independence with unrestrained joy. Because of the uncertainty of what independence meant, she found quite a different reaction among the people of Okutu; they were fearful.
Routine work at the hospital proceeded normally as the months marched on, the difference being the incessant talk of independence and Lumumba. His zealous MNC (National Congolese Movement) followers penetrated into the remotest villages and camps, influencing people to adopt their views by power of speech, and when that failed, by pressure of threats. Although the villagers overwhelmingly supported Lumumba, this was not enough for the MNC; they aimed to number everyone as adherents to their party. They had no respect for the individual right to believe and to vote according to conscience.
The men who followed Lumumba did so with undiluted militancy. The women, for the most part, continued to express fear and apprehension about independence. Sister Mary Rose knew of only one politically active woman, the wife of a graduate nurse working in the dispensary. They were Catholics, one of the two couples among the nurses married in the church. When this nurse embraced the MNC, he removed the gold cross and chain he wore around his neck, replacing it with a large medallion featuring Lumumba’s picture. His ample wife wore not only the Lumumba medallion dangling at her throat, but prominent earrings with Lumumba’s image.
