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Eileen Keane, dressed in a full-length habit, stepped onto a boat in Dublin’s North Wall in 1961. Aged twenty-eight, as a newly qualified doctor and Irish Missionary Sister of the Holy Rosary, her journey would take her to Sierra Leone in West Africa. Although she had just one year’s experience as a doctor, her mission was to replace on a rotating basis other missionary Sister-doctors, exhausted from providing care in single-doctor hospitals in Africa. Over the following forty-five years, in five different African countries, she would provide medical care to young and old, deliver babies, do caesarean sections, and perform life-saving surgery. She would work through the Biafran civil war in Nigeria and come face to face with apartheid in South Africa. In the 1980s, with patients wasting away and dying, she would witness the onset and ravages of the AIDS epidemic. Responding in an innovative manner, and despite much opposition, she would eventually establish one of the first hospices in Africa allowing patients to die with care, companionship and dignity.
This book is Eileen’s memoir.