Dr. Marie Cueman, Dir. of the Institute for Gerontology at Felician University, recently interviewed Sr. Marilyn Minter on RadioFelician University about her mission work in Haiti. Here are some highlights from that interview.

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“I live in the Caribbean, can you believe it?”

Sr. Marilyn Minter, CSSF, does indeed live in the Caribbean as a Felician Sister of North America, where she works among the poorest of the poor in Jacmel, Haiti. She grew up in Metuchen, New Jersey and attended St. Thomas Aquinas High School in Edison. “That’s when I met Felician Sisters for the first time, and they were women of faith, they were women of energy, they were women of testimony, and they were women of joy, and that is what attracted me. I followed them everywhere I went.”

Sr. Marilyn Minter went to Caldwell College but left after her freshman year to attend Felician College, where she majored in education and, “met more beautiful, wonderful, Felician Sisters.” She taught herself to play guitar and got into a rock-and-roll band with some classmates, playing for Church, even writing some of her own music. “I was writing my thoughts, my feelings, and my faith, and I realized it spoke of who I was and what I am, and that was a daughter of God, and I had this crazy idea. I thought I wanted to become a Sister.”

She followed that calling and has been a Felician Sister for 47 years.

Currently, she serves in Jacmel, Haiti, a place she describes as full of natural beauty, but also plagued with abject poverty and corruption. Sr. Minter says despite that, Haitians are survivors and people of hope.

The Felician Sisters have been instrumental in bringing some of that hope to Haiti through the Mother Angela Kitchen, named after Felician foundress, Blessed Mary Angela Truszkowska, which prepares food for hungry students. “We don’t run this kitchen, we have Haitian women and our youth, who we are sponsoring for school. They pay it forward by working in the mission. They run the mission and it becomes their mission, because the Felician Haiti Mission is about empowerment, sustainability, and independence.”

There is a Mother Angela Mobile Clinic and plans are underway for a Felician Bakery, to further continue the powerful message of empowerment and hope. “It is about being the leaven in the world, it is about being yeast, it is about being put someplace you don’t even see, but it rises before you. That’s what the ministry of presence is all about. That is what those Sisters did for me so many years ago, and that’s what I pray happens here at Felician University, and that’s what I pray happens throughout the whole world.”

Listen to Sister Minter’s interview for IFG below: