In Chapter Twelve of my work in progress, I share my experience of adjusting to convent life. The captioned photo was taken during Mass on our Entrance Day. That’s me on the left carrying the chalice. Celeste (fictitious name) served within the religious community until her death in November 2021. The laywoman with glasses, seated in the pew on the right, is my invitee and senior high school geography teacher, another influential woman during my adolescent years.

As far as I know [Celeste used to keep me up to date with news], only two nuns who welcomed the two of us into the community that day are still alive today. I honor the memory of the Sisters in Christ who, by their exemplary life, shaped my formation into the purpose-driven woman I still am today.

Instead of featuring the life of a particular nun, I decided to focus on adjusting to convent life (Chapter 12) and on the three religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience (Chapter 13) that define the life of the religious woman.  

Chapter Twelve: Purpose-Driven Religious Women

On January 14, 1971, I joined the community of Catholic Religious Sisters founded in 1831 in Ireland. The Sisters had arrived in then British Guiana in 1894 at the invitation of the Roman Catholic Bishop of the Society of Jesus to provide for the colony’s educational needs. The first two Sisters and later arrivals came from the Motherhouse in England.

By the 1930s, the small and aging community could no longer cope with the growing enrolment in both their elementary and secondary schools. The local Mother Superior turned for help to the Union of the Religious Sisters in the United States. Forming a new affiliation, the British Guiana Mission became part of the Province in Pennsylvania in November 1934. Eleven months later, ten American sisters arrived in the colony. Within two years, the first Guianese postulant entered the American Novitiate in Pennsylvania. Over the next thirty-five years, twenty-seven Guianese sisters prepared for their final or perpetual vows in the United States. On their return to the colony, they brought with them the American way of being and doing.

All this changed when another young woman, Celeste, and I were received as postulants during a Mass and entrance ceremony held at the Motherhouse in Kingston, Georgetown. My mother and younger sister were present, as well as my senior high school geography teacher, my invitee. In the spirit of Guyana’s independence and focus on self-determination as a young nation, the Sisters decided to train the two of us in Guyana, as was done in the early days under the British Religious Sisters.

The Motherhouse dwarfed my family’s small, three-bedroom flat in Queenstown, a middle-class residential area in the capital. The Community Room alone, with its back wall lined with books, took up more space than our three bedrooms together. Located on prime real estate property in Kingston, a neighborhood in old colonial Georgetown, the vast three-story building and spacious grounds with a flower garden extended over the entire length of the block facing the Atlantic Ocean, just a ten-minute walk away.

June 1971 marked the twentieth anniversary of the opening of the Kingston Convent. Their former Motherhouse for fifty-eight years, in a poor working-class neighborhood in southern Georgetown, had become unsafe for habitation, prompting the move. The dismantled chapel reconstructed in a central position of the Kingston Motherhouse must’ve given the old, retired sisters a sense of continuity with their foundation home.

At nineteen-going-on-twenty years old, I became the youngest member of the Guyana community; Celeste was six years older. Two young Guyanese nuns were in their late twenties. The oldest Sisters were in their eighties. The majority were in their forties and fifties.

I found it intimidating to live among these purpose-driven, educated women with outstanding service to our country and vast life experience. Most were educators: among them were headmistresses, current and retired, and a university professor. Others were in the medical profession—doctors, nurses, and a pharmacist—working at the Catholic hospital administered by a member of the Religious Community. A few served in the social services at the orphanage for boys three to sixteen years old, also run by the Sisters. With the exception of the Sisters in their eighties, they all engaged in charitable work of some kind, usually once a week. Such work included visiting the sick and dying in the hospitals, teaching reading and writing to illiterate adults, Catechism classes in the parish, and helping with care of abandoned infants and handicapped children at non-governmental institutions.

These religious women were nothing like my mother’s sewing clients. Dressing up and other frivolous concerns of secular women were not topics discussed at the dining table. Celeste and I fell into observation mode. We only spoke when spoken to. They didn’t use Creole English, a Guyanese dialect spoken at home and among the general population. They spoke in perfect British or American English, with all the added th’s and word-ending emphases. We followed suit. By the time I started university in September 1972, my English diction was so perfect that the other undergraduates in my geography class thought I was a foreign student from Brazil.

To avoid disturbing the silence that reigned within the convent walls and beyond in the upscale neighborhood, I began speaking with a lower tone. After an older nun commented on my loud laugher, I also began covering my mouth with my hands to muffle the sound. “Very vulgar,” she told me.

Another major change for me was meal-related: mealtimes, cuisine, and eating habits. Unlike local practice, the nuns ate their main meal at dinner time in the evenings, instead of lunch time at noon. American-style meals, prepared by two black, female kitchen staff, didn’t include my favorite local dishes—chow-mein, cook-up rice, curry, mettagee, and pepperpot. Worse yet, the food tasted bland. I learned later that onion, garlic, pepper, and several herbs and spices used to season our local foods were considered aphrodisiacs, to be avoided by those living a celibate life. Who knew?

Celeste and I also observed that the nuns ate like parakeets. To fall in line with such temperance, we began eating much less than we were accustomed to doing at home. For years to come, my digestive system grumbled against the new regime.

For over a year, I resisted adapting to the nuns’ bathing habits. They showered once a day…in the evenings. Who takes only one shower in a hot and humid tropical country—located between 8.7- and 0.9-degree latitude north of the Equator—where you sweat all day and night? At my parents’ home, we showered two to three times a day: in the morning before school or work, in the afternoons on returning home, and again in the evening if we had to go out.

Over the next eight months of our postulancy, Celeste and I continued to wear our regular laywomen clothing, but with a more moderate hemline than the mini-skirt length popular at the time. We both joined the teaching staff at St. John’s High School for girls, then still run by the Religious Community. As a school education had lifted me and my siblings out of a life of poverty, I had no doubt that choosing the teaching profession was God’s will for my life of service. Under the supervision of the Deputy Head Mistress, I taught art, geography, and religious knowledge to the four classes of Form One twelve-year-old students, equivalent to seventh grade in the USA.

For my convent chore, Sister Mary Magdalene, a Guyanese kindergarten teacher and sister-in-charge of the Motherhouse, assigned me to assist the Sister Sacristan, a local-born nun in her forties responsible for the chapel and adjoining sacristy. In the evenings after dinner, she taught me how to set out the vestments for our chaplain to be used for the celebration of Mass the following morning at 6:00 a.m. In the mornings before community prayers at 5:30 a.m., she prepared the altar for Mass. The sacristan entrusted me with the task of picking fresh flowers and arranging them in two large vases. The flowers adorned the tabernacle, housing the consecrated Eucharist on the altar against the back wall of the chapel.

With my artistic skills, I also worked with another sister in creating textile banners, usually 16 inches wide by 32 inches long, that hung from the lectern used during Mass. These banners changed with the Church’s liturgical seasons: Advent, Christmas, Ordinary Time (after Epiphany), Lent, Easter, and Ordinary Time (after Pentecost).

The chaplain, a teacher at the Jesuit high school for boys, was a lanky English priest in his sixties. He wore his shirt tucked into trousers, a size larger at the waist, pulled tight with a belt. He belonged to the older pre-Vatican Council II generation of priests who didn’t look a woman in the eye for fear of having impure thoughts. He didn’t eat with us. Instead, he preferred to eat alone at a dining table reserved in the Visitors’ Room, adjacent to the Community Room, on the second floor. After Mass, Sister Sacristan made sure that his breakfast tray, prepared by one of our cooks, was set out to his liking. She never shared this duty with me: Serving Father was a privilege she wasn’t ready to relinquish.

One day, while arranging flowers in the workroom adjoining the sacristy, a visiting older nun from the Mahaica Convent, 22 miles from Georgetown, approached me to ask if I could assist her in doing research on the history of the Mahaica Leper Hospital. With Sister Magdalene’s permission, I accompanied her to the building housing the National Archives. I don’t recall how many times we visited the Archives. Beginning in 1936, at the request of the Catholic Bishop at the time, American nuns began working as trained nurses at the Mahaica Hospital where there were over two hundred patients suffering from Hansen’s Disease. Over the next thirty-five years, American Sisters administered the hospital. After they left in 1971, two Guyanese nuns continued to assist patients in every way possible with bi-monthly visits and care.

I also had the opportunity to accompany Sister Magdalene on one of her weekly visits to the Tiger Bay slum area of mostly black residents, located in the Downtown Commercial District along the Demerara Riverbank. Though the slum or ghetto was known for its violence, Sister Magdalene was not afraid of visiting the families in their makeshift shacks. After several years of assisting them in whatever way she could, she was well-known and respected by everyone who greeted us that day.

With the children of Tiger Bay in mind, Sister Magdalene asked me to plan and take charge of a two-week Arts & Crafts Workshop in August, during the school holidays, for twenty girls ranging from eight to twelve years old. She gave me a thick handicrafts book with ideas to choose from and provided the materials I would need. Two adult women accompanied the children on their trip to and from the convent compound. The sessions, held in a spacious room next to the laundry room, took place from Monday to Friday in the mornings from nine to twelve o’clock, with a half-hour break for a drink and snacks. I divided the girls into two groups—eight and nine years and ten to twelve years.

It was the first major project I had undertaken on my own. The two women helped with supervision. Sister Magdalene only joined us at snack-time. The joy on the girls’ faces at the end of each session gave meaning to all my hard work. At the end of the workshop, I had learned to push beyond my limits and achieve much more than I thought possible. What a gift she had in bringing out the best in others! 

Without any impediment to our acceptance by the Religious Community, Celeste and I moved on to the next phase of our religious training—the novitiate. Our new makeover would demand much more than an external transformation. It would demand a new way of being—a destruction of the Self. Everything that defined my self-expression—artistic talent, singing popular songs, and love of dance—had to be relinquished and transformed for the glory of God alone.

As a young, brown-skinned Guyanese woman of an independent socialist republic, I would later clash with our white, New York-born Formation Mistress.