Hope and hardship

Views: 72,860 views. Comments: 3 Comments.
Tags: books, community service, winter-2009

An image from Hope Endures

Blind faith can work miracles, but Dr Colette Livermore will tell you it can also cause heartache.

The UQ graduate joined Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity (MC) at 18 after watching the famous documentary Something Beautiful for God, but turned her back on her beliefs a decade later and has recently written a book about the experience.

Published by Random House, Hope Endures is the first official account from a sister within the order, and tells how Dr Livermore left disillusioned after 11 years of service to pursue a new career in medicine.

Dr Livermore’s work with the MC took her to Calcutta, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea, but her story began in Moss Vale, New South Wales, where the nuns at her secondary school urged pupils to find compassion for the suffering of others.

Although not a devout Catholic at the time, Dr Livermore was moved by the shocking images of starving children in Biafra (now Nigeria), and gave up a place studying medicine at the University of New South Wales to join the MC in 1973.

Click on the image to read an exclusive extract from Hope Endures

“The immediacy of Mother Teresa’s compassion attracted me,” Dr Livermore says.

“I felt people needed simple things like food and clothing more than complex medical care so I swapped my jeans for a sari and left home to join her.”

Dr Livermore took her first vows before Mother Teresa in Melbourne in 1975 before travelling with her and three other sisters to start a house in Papua New Guinea’s Gulf province.

There she taught literacy and numeracy to low achieving primary-school students, but moved to Port Moresby after contracting cerebral malaria.

Central to Mother Teresa’s teachings was the acceptance of poverty and suffering, and Dr Livermore (then known as Sister Tobit) committed herself to difficult tasks in the Philippines, where she worked in shantytowns and tended to those with tuberculosis.

She also spent several years in Melbourne working in soup kitchens, assisting the elderly and pitching in at homeless shelters.

But the strict obedience and unwavering routine of the MC led Dr Livermore to question her path in life, and she left the order in 1984 and began to doubt her faith.

“I was in turmoil because I had vowed to obey my superiors but also to serve the poor and desperate who are not able to conform to a rigid timetable,” she says.

“When a person comes to you asking for help, such as the parents of a very ill child I met in Manila, I felt conscience-bound to respond in the best way I could, but was told to send them away because it was a day of prayer for part of our community.

“Moreover, when I wrote to Calcutta of this I was told that my hands were tied by obedience.

“Another problem was that I felt very poorly prepared for the work we were to do. For example I received no training in teaching, basic medicine and nursing or in the language and culture of the people we served.”

Although her faith had been compromised, the desire to help those less fortunate had not, and she resurrected her goal of becoming a doctor as a mature-aged student in 1985.

“The University of Queensland gave me the chance to study medicine,” Dr Livermore says.

“I applied as an undergraduate with a 13-year-old matriculation and was accepted on the basis of my NSW Higher School Certificate pass.

“I had a rough transition from the convent to university life and my classmates were amazed to know someone so ancient who had used log tables at school was now doing medicine and struggling to use a scientific calculator.”

Dr Livermore recalls many memorable experiences with her new group of friends, and remembers carting skeleton bones from tutorials in her backpack while riding to and from her rented house in Milton.

She busied herself with her studies until graduating in 1990, landing shortly after in the Toowoomba Accident and Emergency department.

She then completed rural service in Bundaberg before heading to Katherine in the Northern Territory, where she worked as a hospital doctor and also with the Air Medical service.

“I flew out to communities for routine clinics and was also on call for emergencies.  I visited most settlements in the district but my main communities were Kalkaringi – famous for its struggle for land rights – and Wulgar,” she says.

Her next calling took her to East Timor as a volunteer doctor with the Uma Ita Nian Clinic run by the Maryknoll sisters in Aileu.

“We did general, antenatal, and tuberculosis clinics and had a ration distribution for malnourished children and the TB patients,” Dr Livermore says.

“We went out on mobile clinics once or twice a week travelling on roads which defied belief or in the dry season drove up river beds. With the nurses I saw over a hundred people while sitting on a box in a hut or school room.”

After two-and-a-half years she returned to Australia in 2003 for family reasons and joined a general practice in Gosford, New South Wales.

That year also marked Mother Teresa’s posthumous beatification (the becoming of a saint), and it was with mixed feelings Dr Livermore took her place with thousands of others at the Vatican to witness the proceedings.

“She was a dynamic, energetic woman whose word was law,” Dr Livermore says.

“She seemed very certain of her beliefs and convictions but after her death letters were published which showed she struggled with a terrible pain of the loss of God and felt he may not exist.

“She was afraid to confront the doubts and questions within her because she feared committing blasphemy and prayed that ‘if there be a God forgive me’.”

It was standing in St Peter’s Square, trying to reconcile her journey from nun to non-believer, that Dr Livermore decided to write Hope Endures.

“I hope readers will take my point that no matter what organisation we belong to we must be true to our inner truth, for if we betray that, we betray our whole purpose and the people we serve,” she says.

“There is a great difference between the obedience of co-operation and cohesion that stops us running a red light and the obedience of cowardice which silences us when we should speak and paralyses us when we should act.

“The truth can defend itself in open debate. It is not a weakling that needs to be closeted away.”

Hope Endures by Colette Livermore is published by William Heinemann Australia, RRP $34.95

By Cameron Pegg

• Home
• Graduate Contact
• Alumni Profiles
• Global Education: Divining world trends