Exiting the Labyrinth
"I was 22 years old, and Idi Aman had just been ousted, and I thought that everything in Uganda would be OK."
It was to be the beginning of a 17 years journey through three African countries in which she saw horrible violence, worked with some of the most deprived people on the planet, and came out of it suffering the same level of post-traumatic stress disorder as soldiers on a battlefield.
Jo, who married Kilcullen man Matt Doyle almost five years ago, has now recorded her story in a book, 'Labyrinth through the Elephant Grass', which will be launched in Kilcullen's Town Hall Theatre tonight, Wednesday 6 August, at 7.30pm.
Landing in Uganda, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, Jo was immediately posted to a hospital run by Italian and French doctors in Gulu, in the north of the country.
"I was immediately appointed nurse tutor, as the previous one had just left after an assassination attempt," she recalls wryly. "She was from Idi Amin's tribe, and there was a lot of tribal violence going on."
Her stint there was just two years, but against the background of another coup and 'elections' which brought in another president, Milton Obote, it was an experience that changed her utterly.
"We went through two hijackings, a lot of shootings, our compound being attacked, and the results of horrendous atrocities coming in to the hospital day after day." Jo recalls one day during the election when a group of soldiers burst into her classroom and marched all her students away at gunpoint to vote for Obote.
"From that point, everything changed for me. I became much more serious in myself. I had come from carefree girl with a hunky dory fun life to a place where it was all about life and death, with wondering who was going to survive a night and who wasn't."
One particularly violent incident, when a man was murdered right in front of her, is the core incident in Jo's book. "It drew me into myself. I ended up praying more, looking at life from a different angle. My early idealism actually became stronger."
At a crossroads about what to do with her life, and influenced by the work of a group of Irish Franciscan nuns in Kampala who were also in the middle of the bombings and shootings, she eventually joined the order.
"I went home to Scotland first, and found that I didn't fit in any more."
After doing a midwifery course in Drogheda, she returned to Africa. "At the time the Ethiopian famine was at its height, so I went out there amid all the horrors of a communist system that wouldn't admit there was a problem even when their people were dropping like flies in a meningitis epidemic."
Working as midwife and with under-five children was hard. "There was a lot of walking from clinic to clinic, there were a lot of maternal deaths, women bleeding to death in the ditches while trying to get to the clinics."
After three years of that, Jo got sick herself and was brought back to Ireland. She did a year-long spirituality course and then went back out to Africa, this time to Kenya, to city slums and street children and AIDS.
"I spent six months walking around, meeting eight-year-olds sniffing glue all day, and older drug addicts. I ended up starting a programme where they could tell their own stories in a group situation and in so doing come to a realisation that often they actually had choices in their lives."
Jo carried out that work for some four years, with positive results. But through it all she was conscious of a nagging 'pain' inside herself, which she couldn't figure out. On a renewal course in the US, she was able to finally pinpoint the reason.
"It was survivor guilt, over that man who was murdered in front of me all those years before in Uganda. And I saw then that so many missionaries suffered from similar post-traumatic stress disorder. We had deadened ourselves to cope, to keep going, while our vitality as development workers, as missionaries, was fading."
Although she did go back briefly to Africa, Jo finally left the religious life and came back to Ireland. "I left the order so that I could remain healthy, otherwise I knew I'd be going right back into the same thing again. I knew by then that trauma disconnects us from our family and our culture, and I realised that I couldn't go through that again. At a very dark time during my renewal course, I had made a sort of pact with the man whom I had seen being murdered, that I would survive -- in his memory, if you like."
Today she helps the Irish Missionary Union, facilitating workshops for returned missionaries, helping them 'debrief'. To tell their own stories as an aid to their own healing and revitalisation.
Writing 'Labyrinth through the Elephant Grass' was a healing experience. "It made me realise that not everything about my life in Africa was dark. I found humorous stories as I wrote. Maybe it is the kind of dark humour that you only find in those kind of situations."
The writing was its own journey, in which she found that there had been sometimes painful choices to make, but that there were choices which brought new life.
Brian Byrne.
