By Sheila Bergren Staff Writer, Morrison County Record
Being back at the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls following a knee surgery and waiting out the pandemic, Sister Mary Dumonceaux, 75, have had time to reflect on her life. After joining the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls in 1963, she has many memories and stories to tell.
For the last 12 years, Dumonceaux has served as a missionary in San Rafael, Mexico. The ministry, she and the other sisters are a part of reaches out to about 500 families in the San Rafael area. As the sisters’ ministry stretches out to more than 40 other villages surrounding San Rafael, Dumonceaux said each village has from 30 to 100 families they serve.
Recovering from a knee surgery and waiting out the pandemic, Sister Mary Dumonceaux has had plenty of time to reflect on her life.
While the ministry in the San Rafael area began in 2003 and Dumonceaux joined them in 2008, the reason for it is the same that drew her to missionary work in the first place, Dumonceaux said.
“It is the Franciscans’ heart to seek out the most poor or the most needy wherever we live to make a difference in their lives,” she said.
A second reason Dumonceaux was drawn to mission work was the people she met. Despite the extreme hardships they had, they were very welcoming, friendly and had a very deep faith in God.
“My own faith has been deeply inspired and strengthened by living with them and seeing how their joy and faith in the Lord continues under the hardest circumstances,” she said.
When Dumonceaux joined the sisters in San Rafael in 2008, they started a specific ministry to address the lack of education for girls.
“One of the things we noticed, visiting the people door to door was that education for young women or young girls weren’t highly valued. If there were any money in the family, it went to the boy to be able to go to school, so the girls were lucky if they went through grade school. After that, they were pretty much home, waiting to be noticed and proposed to,” Dumonceaux said.
To address the need, the Franciscan Sisters opened a home where girls can room and board during the weekdays to attend the public high school in San Rafael and return to their families on the weekends. The program is sponsored by donations from donors in the United States as well as in Mexico.
“Our criteria for choosing the girls were those most needy among the needy,” she said.
Because of the program, many young girls have been able to graduate high school. At first, many became leaders in their communities, but over the years, the Franciscan Sisters have seen a change in the women — many desire to obtain a college education. While all in their most recent classes have applied for college, not all have been accepted as there are only so many spots available, Dumonceaux said. Those who are fortunate to be accepted are then either sponsored by specific donors and when none are available, the student may work during the week to pay for weekend classes.
Seeing the interest and desire for furthering their education is exciting for the sisters. The fact that the young women and their families have adopted a desire and a greater understanding of the value of education for young women was unexpected, but one the sisters embrace wholeheartedly.
Although some of the conditions in rural Mexico may be far from the more modernized world, Dumonceaux said it just reminds her of growing up in rural Foley in the 1940s and 1950s with no television, limited electricity, the telephone still being on party lines and the work was moderate, manual and hard for any parents to survive. Along with it also came the strong family connection, love of God and love for their neighbors.
“What we would call serious hardship today was at the time normal, so in San Rafael, I recognized immediately a situation that was very similar to my own childhood. It was easy to identify with the people from that experience,” she said.
Dumonceaux said while her aunt was a Franciscan sister and several other young women in Foley entered into the Franciscan community, it was her own experience with the sisters that ultimately inspired her to join the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls.
At first, the sisters served at St. John’s Church by teaching religion classes, organizing the maintenance and cleaning of the church, visiting with families and helping those in need, directing choirs and more. Later, when St. John’s Area School was built, the main ministry of the teachers became teaching in that school, Dumonceaux said.
The sisters lived in a home across from the school and Dumonceaux recalls the many visits she and a friend made.
“We could go ring the doorbell and we were always welcomed by the sisters,” she said.
Dumonceaux and her friend also often picked the mail from the post office about two blocks down the street for the sisters. Whenever they returned, one of their sisters who had a passion for cooking and baking, always gave them a cookie for their troubles.
“The simplicity and the actions of the sisters were very inspiring,” she said.
Dumonceaux said although both her parents grew up on farms, they didn’t have enough money to buy their own. Instead they owned three or four acres where they raised all of their food. Potatoes were planted and harvested in a field with enough yield for a year. Her mom also had a large garden where she grew a variety of fruits and vegetables the family canned at the end of the summer. They had more than enough to feed the family.
“My mom was a great organizer, so she knew exactly how many jars of each vegetable and fruit she would need to plan her menus for the whole year,” Dumonceaux said.
Another project the family had was to raise 100 chickens during the summer. They were then butchered in the fall and kept in a locker plant. They had enough chickens to have two for supper on Sundays.,
“At that time, chicken was a really high class meat, so that was very special,” she said.
Since the garden often supplied an abundance of fruit and vegetables, the family often shared it with the sisters, who then prepared and canned them, as well.
Since the sisters at the time had very little income, the women of the parish held three or four food collections each year for the sister.
“The sisters were very much a part of our lives. The whole way of interaction with the sisters were very personable. They were also dependent on the people on part of their livelihood and we depended on them for support and guidance. It was most exciting,” she said.
Dumonceaux recalls when she first told her parents she wanted to join the convent. At the same time as they were very supportive and thrilled about it, they also wanted to make sure they had done nothing to influence her and that it truly was her own decision. It was a commitment they took seriously; not something to just try out, but a calling for life.
“Not everybody is able to follow through on that for a lifetime, but the intent is that this is a life time commitment. I have always been grateful to them because I prayed a little longer about it. I didn’t really have any doubts in my mind, because I had already gone over those questions a lot,” she said.
Reflecting on her choice of fully devoting her life to serving God and people, Dumonceaux said she doesn’t regret her decision not to have children of her own. As the oldest of 11 children, she spent a large period of her childhood, helping her parents raise her younger siblings. By the time she was five, there were already an abundance of children in the home and she helped with feeding and clothing.
“Mom basically took care of the babies until they were about two or three years old. When the next one was coming along, she didn’t have the time or energy for all of them simultaneously, so I became the mom to many of my siblings. That experience was wonderful and it has left a lasting relationship with a lot of my siblings,” she said.
Before Dumonceaux became a missionary worker in Venezuela in 1976, she learned Spanish in Bolivia. Since then, she has taken several course to refresh her Spanish skills.
Because the sisters believe it is important to speak the language of the people, they speak Spanish when they are in the presence of Mexican girls or other people who works with them to take care of the girls. Only when the sisters are alone do they speak English.
“It’s very important to have that respect for other people’s language,” she said.
Waiting for the pandemic to come to an end or eases, Dumonceaux is eager to return to San Rafael. Although COVID-19 has presented many obstacles, not only for the sisters, but also for the people they serve, she is hopeful for the future.
