Special spazio + spadoni Missionary October: Suor Maria Luisa, Missionaria ed Ingegnera in Etiopia
Two vocations intersect in the life of Maria Luisa Caruso: that of building houses for the poor and that of setting out as a missionary in Africa
By Miela Fagiolo D’Attila
So she became an engineer and then a religious in the congregation of the Sisters of Charity of St. Jeanne Antida Thouret, of which she is now coordinator for the Foundation, which is the operational arm of the congregation for service to the poor.
“I studied civil engineering and also worked designing structures in mission lands. I was very happy with that. I was somehow fulfilling my childhood dream,” she told Francesca Perrone in an interview.
In fact, Sister Maria Luisa, 57, from Erba, loved listening to the experiences of the missionaries who came by the parish to tell about faraway lands.
“They would tell full of enthusiasm about their lives among the poorest,” she says, ”I dreamed of leaving for the missions and there living with the people and maybe building houses for the poorest people in the villages. I dreamed of doing that together with my dad who was an engineer and builder.”
There came the Lord’s call to “follow him by leaving everything and listening to his voice to go and serve the brothers and sisters, there where He alone would show me.”
She joins the Sisters of Charity of St. Jeanne Antida Thouret, and after eight years leaves for Ethiopia, where she experiences the urgency of the needs of the poor.
She builds facilities, starts a cooking school for the women of Shire, and with the help of the CEI and many Italian families and parishes, a hotel school is born that offers young women the opportunity to learn to cook.
After the first few years, the courses are now attended by about 120 students a year, and now Sister Maria Luisa has a broader horizon: “The service that the Congregation now asks of me is to follow and accompany development projects at our missions in 32 countries around the world.
I feel strongly the pope’s call: ‘We are called to act, to be the face of Christ.’ We are called to be Hope and to give Hope.’”
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