For Burma’s first Maryknoll Sister, now in Hawaii, spreading the Gospel has long been a family affair

By Anna Weaver | Hawaii Catholic Herald

The Male family, including Sarah (back row, right) with a visitor (far right) in 1992 or 1993.

On the day that Ja Htu Bu “Sarah” Male (pronounced Ma-lay) left Burma to go to the Philippines to begin her preparation to be a Maryknoll sister, her parents brought out a small statue of the Virgin Mary and prayed over her with it.

The statue had been treasured by her father, Columban Gam Aung Male, since he won it in a catechist contest in 1955 while studying to become Catholic.

“For almost 40 years he kept that statue with him, but he handed it to me the day I left for Maryknoll with his and Mom’s blessing,” said Sister Sarah, 35, in a recent interview at the Maryknoll Sisters home in Manoa. Now, even on short trips, she travels with the statue.

Sister Sarah is the first Maryknoll Sister from Burma, now called the Union of Myanmar by the country’s ruling military government. She received her Hawaii assignment in December 2007 and seems to have been predestined for a life as a missionary.

Both her father and her mother, Lucia Roi Ja Male, are converts from animism to Catholicism. Columban was a chief catechist in Kachin State in northern Burma. While that area is predominantly Christian, only about four percent of Burma’s total population is Christian and only one percent is Catholic. Most are Buddhist.

A traveling priest usually could visit areas of Kachin just once a year, so Columban did many of the tasks a priest would normally do. That meant traveling a great deal and making only about 50 cents a month. Lucia supported the family with farming while also doing catechesis work.

“She provided food for us the whole yearlong,” said Sister Sarah, who is the middle child of seven. Because they placed a priority on education, the Males managed to send their four oldest kids to Catholic boarding school.

When she was just five, Sister Sarah’s parents took their two youngest daughters (their youngest son was not yet born) with them to a catechist assignment in Kamaing, which was a remote and unsafe area with no schooling. Sarah was left with an aunt and her older siblings were at boarding school.

“My mom said, ‘We don’t want to interrupt your future like that,’” said Sister Sarah, remembering how her mother told her goodbye. “At that age I understood because of the way my mom handled me.”

Grade school missionary

The family’s last catechist assignment was in Phakant, a jade mining area. Sarah and her brother and two sisters would be picked up by their dad every summer and they would make the three-day walk from their boarding schools to Phakant, stopping at houses of the many people who knew the family along the way.

At age six or seven, Sarah started teaching Sunday school to children her age during summers at home, sharing what she had learned at Catholic boarding school. “That was the beginning of my life of becoming a missionary, going beyond my boundaries, coming back and sharing what I learned,” Sister Sarah said.

She did well in school. In her last year of high school, she passed on her first try the difficult national exams required of anyone wanting to go to a university.

“I wanted to study medicine when I was young because in my country there is so much need and so many health problems,” Sister Sarah said. However, college concentrations are assigned to students and she was given zoology as her focus.

Sister Sarah could not start at the university immediately because student protests in 1988 led the government to shut down all schools for two years. In the meantime she volunteered at the pre-major seminary in Myitkyina in northern Burma. She taught English to seminarians, cooked, did bookkeeping, and used her connections in the jade business in Phakant to help raise money.

Maryknoll Magazine insight

University classes resumed, but only in three to four month intervals to prevent students organizing. So Sarah continued to volunteer at the seminary throughout college. The seminary rector, Father Donald Lasap, gave her Maryknoll Magazines to read. One included an article about Maryknoll Brother John Beeching’s work with refugee Buddhist monks in Thailand.

Because Buddhists are the majority religion in Burma and the government is run by Buddhists, non-Buddhists are discriminated against. This prejudice left Sarah with a bad perception of Burmese Buddhists.

“[Reading about Brother Beeching] broke my prejudice over the military government and Burmese Buddhists,” Sister Sarah said. “I thought, ‘If he can do it, why can’t I?’”

Sister Sarah later got to meet Brother Beeching, who now does missionary work in Burma with a small group of Maryknoll religious and lay missionaries.

Sarah said her parents’ catechist work and her own Sunday school teaching “nourished me a lot and was the core that made me go beyond my boundaries.” She easily connected with the Maryknoll order’s mission to go out into the world.

Indeed, the Male family’s church work influenced several of their children. Their oldest daughter is a Divine Providence Sister and second oldest daughter is with the Sisters of St. Francis Xavier. Both work in Burma. An adopted brother is a priest in Burma.

It took Sister Sarah four years of writing to Maryknoll to overcome the obstacles of entering the order. Maryknoll had no Burmese sisters and, at the time, there were concerns about whether she would be able to return home if she left the country to enter the religious life.

From January 1999 until November 2004 she furthered her education and religious studies and did volunteer work in parishes in the Philippines. She then spent 10 months at the Maryknoll Motherhouse in New York before going to Chicago in August 2005 for her two years as a Maryknoll novice.

First assignment: Hawaii

On Aug. 12, 2007, she took her first vows in Maryknoll, New York, and had her “mission sending ceremony” on Dec. 8, 2007. Two days later, she arrived in Hawaii, her first-choice mission assignment.

While most of Sister Sarah’s time with Maryknoll has been good, there have been sad times too.

Her brother passed away in 2005 and she was unable to return home for his funeral. She was able to go home after her mother died in April 2007, but not in time for the burial ceremony. In September 2007, she was set to go home again, but protests in Burma prevented it. The next time she’ll go back will probably be in 2010.

Since coming to the islands she has spent time in West Oahu volunteering at homeless shelters.

“The island itself is beautiful and the people are beautiful. Only, seeing these homeless people is hurting me a lot — people that are in their own land and are categorized as homeless,” she said.

In Burma, people are displaced on government orders. “In that kind of situation, we have something to blame for it,” Sister Sarah said. “Here in Hawaii, I could not understand it.”

She would like some day to work on projects to help poor people in Hawaii, because, as she puts it, “Theology in our spiritual life is very important, but if we can’t fit in people, how can we preach? Once people have something on their tables, then we can talk about God.”

Starting this fall, Sister Sarah will teach religion classes at Maryknoll High School.

“I want to be involved with the teenagers. I want to share with them what I have experienced, what I have learned and the value of Christianity,” she said. “Also, I want to learn from their experiences, their lives that are different from me.”

Sister Sarah has three more years until her final vows and is aiming to be in Hawaii for the next three to five years. “It takes time to root here, to let go of the familiar,” she said.

“Each path that you choose has pros and cons but the most important thing is whether you are happy or not. If you are happy, if you feel relaxed and see your growth, then that’s your call.”