Recognizing a Darien success mission
A PHILIPPINES born doctor who, as Sister Jocelyn Fenix, spent over 15 years working in Darien, where she helped create a farmers’ project growing and processing medicinal plants, was recently named co-formator of Maryknoll Sisters Formation Program in Chicago, IL.
On Sunday June 1 she will celebrate 25 years with Maryknoll Sisters with a special Mass at the Maryknoll Sisters Center.
Born in Manila, Sister Joji, is a graduate of the University of East Ramon Magsaysay Memorial Medical Center, Philippines, where she received her degree as a Doctor of Medicine in 1985. She is also a graduate of the University of the Philippines, Quezon City, where she received a B.S. in psychology in 1979.
Before entering Maryknoll in 1989, she served as a consultant for the Philippines Ministry of Health.
As part of her admissions process with the congregation, Sister Joji lived and worked, in the southern part of the Philippines in their Primary Health Care Program, training barefoot doctors and health promoters in very poor rural villages. After a brief period in the Chicago Center, Sister Joji was assigned to Panama, where she served 24 communities in Darien where she working holistic health promotion and promoting of organic farming techniques, and small project administration at the Santa Fe Pastoral Center.
Sister Joji also started a small savings and loan association to help local farmers develop their own integrated family farms including collecting and cultivating medicinal plants that later formed part of a project and a small group to process and commercialize some of them into herbal teas, soaps, and salves, that is now independent but still in existence. She also was involved in doing leadership training and sponsoring popular art and theatre workshops for children and youth in the area.
Founded in 1912, Maryknoll Sisters is the first US-based congregation of women religious dedicated to foreign mission. Working primarily among the poor and marginalized in 26 countries around the world, they now number nearly 500 members.
