LOURDES DAYS HELPED INSPIRE A GREAT NURSE

I RECENTLY write about a lady called Margaret O’Gorman who trained to be a nurse in Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital, pictured right, in the late 1960s.

She spent three years in town and then went off on her life journey.

It took her to Dublin and then Texas, working in intensive care where open heart surgery was being pioneered.

She was studying the very best in medicine, so why not bring it to the very most that need it she thought.

She volunteered to go to Ethiopia in the 70s, at the height of a Famine, with Concern.

They landed in Tigre, experiencing ‘ horrendous’ poverty the likes of which you could never imagine.

She, with others, operated a big vaccination programme and set up feeding stations, milk and porridge for 400-600 children each day.

She spent a year there and when returning 18 months later got caught up in the war and had to remain under siege for a week, until the Americans got her out with the help of the British.

She flew to Geneva with a coded message for the Red Cross, never knowing what it said.

While in Ethiopia, she met and fell in love with an Englishman, working on a rural development plan.

They married and lived in both Kenya and Nigeria before returning to England and settling in Ditchling, near Brighton.

She would spend the next 20 years working for the NHS, until recently retiring.

Speaking to Margaret last week was an experience, a woman who grew to know the fragility of life more than most.

But the conversation kept coming back to the MMM community in Drogheda and Our Lady of Lourdes.

‘I couldn’t have done all the things I did without the MMMs and the Lourdes,’ she stated.

‘It was all down to the training I received there.

She recalled Sister Bosco, a magnificent tutor, and the many others, Eilis Weber of the MMMs included, who passed on their teaching in a very humane way.