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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 April - 3 May 2000 Issue No. 479
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Out in the world
A cloistered life? Not for this nun. Al-Ahram Weekly speaks to Tasoni Yoanna Salib
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Special Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The first time I met Tasoni Yoanna Salib was at a Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) task force meeting. Sitting in a circle of NGO practitioners, activists and professionals, she spoke of her experience of trying to eliminate the practice in rural communities; of addressing the entire community, especially men, and of the powerful influence men and women who choose not to circumcise their daughters have on the rest of the community.
When Tasoni Yoanna speaks, people listen. Not that she is loud. Her voice is not especially powerful, nor is she particularly eloquent, if by eloquence we mean a cache of stored rhetoric. But she is witty, and above all sincere.
Told that Tasoni Yoanna was a nun, I was confused. Nuns in the Coptic Church have no place but the cloister -- a place where, I found out later, she is rarely to be found, except, perhaps, when she is sick. You would be far more likely to find Tasoni Yoanna at one of the 21 villages where COST (the Coptic Organisation for Services and Training) maintains a presence. As operational manager of COST, Tasoni Yoanna has worked hard to build an organisation that trains community workers, promotes health awareness and provides services to remote villages.
Originally from Qwesna, in the Menoufiya governorate, Tasoni Yoanna graduated from medical school in 1985. She worked for several years in the rural communities around Maghagha as a doctor, becoming increasingly frustrated by her inability to provide high quality service for free and at not being able to offer preventive medicine. She continued to practise medicine, but as the years went by people started talking: she must decide whether to become a nun or get married. Being a single working woman was just not socially accepted -- a fact which Tasoni Yoanna was very conscious of. But unlike many nuns and consecrated deaconesses who claim that celibacy or monastic life is the only way of life they can accept, Tasoni Yoanna keeps an open mind about the subject.
"All along, I just told God it does not make a difference to me whether I got married or whether I became a nun." But as one suitor after another was rejected, her calling became clearer. "It wasn't that I got a kick out of rejecting suitors, but I got this sense of peace and contentment every time one left." Her mother became frantic with worry. She was a widow and very attached to her daughter -- losing her to a monastic order was unthinkable. "In fact, she told me that if she died it would be because of my entering the convent."
Tasoni Yoanna knew of the Sisters of Saint Mary Convent, but concern for her mother prevented her from taking off straight away. She decided to do it gradually, accepting a medical post in a hospital at Beni Suef. "It was to give my mother a sense of reassurance; that I was not going away to become a nun but because it was part of my work." She knew that she didn't want to become a nun in a cloister: "The happiest time for me is when I am with people. I could not imagine being separated from them."
For some time she lived in the convent, but worked as a doctor in regular clothes. At 29, she was ordained a postulant. She did not tell her mother, but word travels fast and her brothers found out -- then her sister, and finally her mother. "For the first one and a half months my mother was too heart-broken to call me. She cried and cried." Not that Tasoni Yoanna was having a ball. After working for many years as a doctor, she was assigned full time to the kitchen at the convent. Ironically, the sister in charge of the kitchen was a nurse "and so you can imagine what followed," smiled Tasoni mischievously. "It was very tough, but necessary, I suppose, to show the sisters that although I was a doctor, I am just like them and have to observe the same communal chores as everyone".
Soon enough, though, she was out in the villages. The sisters had a mobile clinic that went to villages where no medical units existed and served everyone. Once again she found herself doing everything, from circumcising baby boys to raising awareness of how to prevent certain illnesses. "The great thing about our vocation is that I didn't have to give up all those years of hard work and study; I can make full use of them for humanitarian purposes. My vocation did not restrict or constrain me from pursuing my interests in primary health care."
In 1993 she received a one-year scholarship to study for an MA in community health at Liverpool University. "Most of all I learned a great deal about the politics behind poverty." She was then granted another three-month scholarship on managing primary health care. "Almost everything I learned there I was able to make use of in my work at COST," she said. When she returned, she established the health training programme for community workers, which benefits not only her own group of development practitioners but also those from other NGOs, as well as the Ministry of Social Affairs.
Being a "working nun" has its own set of challenges, different from those faced by an enclosed nun or a consecrated deaconess. In the cloister, she says, you are living in a community of sisters, committed to the same way of life, having similar goals and sharing the same preoccupations. An active nun, however, needs to be able to work with people very different in their vision, lifestyle and motives. A consecrated deaconess works in the world, argues Tasoni Yoanna, but more often than not her work is within or close to the church, and so only a segment of the community is dealt with. "I can tell you, sometimes I wish I was teaching Sunday school," she sighs, "It is so much easier."
As a working nun serving in the community, you feel constantly watched -- obviously, you stick out in your uniform, and ultimately "you are expected to be a leader and a role model at the same time." People expect nuns to be submissive, meek, obedient and generally passive. They end up, she confides, a little disappointed when they see that she is an assertive, proactive woman who has a great deal of decision-making power that she does not hesitate to use.
An image of super-human goodness is often associated with nuns and consequently "people expect you to act like a saint all the time. You are not supposed to get upset or agitated or feel pressured. You are just supposed to take everything with a smile. But you are human, and sometimes people get disappointed when they see that."
Judging by her popularity among the people in the villages -- Christians and Muslims, women and men, children and grown-ups -- Tasoni Yoanna has little to be worried about on that score.
