Love Lifted Many: Sister Pat, SVG & Me
Sister Patsy Douglas
I truly miss, Sister Pat, as is true for many people that she positively impacted in many countries, in many walks of life . She was killed instantly in a car crash while in Barbados on business. Click below for Sister Patsy Douglas, St. Vincent & the Grenadines; via Dominica, West Indies, reading my poem, Tell Me A Story (also the premise and opening piece for the book).
Ann-Marie Lee-Wilkins and Sistah Pat
Also, please take time to visit the Patsy Douglas Youth Empowerment Foundation (PDYEF) that was started months after her death by her best friend, Ann-Marie Lee Wilkins. Ann-Marie was herself empowered as a youth by Sister Pat and went from an academically challenged child to now a Nurse Manager at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Now, she’s paying it forward. The organization acts as a bridge between Maryland, US and St. Vincent and the Grenadines; including helping pregnant teens, stay in school, in both countries. And in the case of Caribbean girls, paying grant scholarship tuitions.
Ann-Marie Lee Wilkins, Founder PDYEF, who while born in SVG, is a naturalized citizen of the US, was given my book, I Say A Prayer For Me: One Woman’s Life of Faith and Triumph, by her neice as a Christmas present. Ann-Marie read it and then shared it with Sister Pat, both agreeing that I must come talk to the youth on the islands of St. Vincent and the Grenadine. They got together and Ann-Marie took me to her home island, where Sister Pat and a group of other Catholic sisters and members of the secular community met me upon landing.
They coordinated a whirlwind 2 week visit with talks across the island with women group high teas to which the men, after hearing their wives go on about the brilliant day they had at the talk, demanded and got their “men’s” event. Men from all walks of life came; and unlike the women; they did not exclude the opposite sex. Which was good seeing that the speaker was the opposit sex. LOL
SVG Girls' High School
Well, from there they had set up talks at every high school on the island, radio stations, including ABC and NICE Radio, SVG-TV, Methodist Hall event with the youth.
I left those islands, a changed woman. I felt connected with a sense of world community as one body and each of us necessary intregal parts of the whole. The message I’d been entrusted to take, my testimony of hope, grace, power, love, and redeption, crossed an ocean and a sea, I believe, left us all changed.
Perhaps, one day soon, I’ll share with you the story and poetry that was born during my three extended ministry/missionary trips to St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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