Name: Sister Micheline Lattouff
Order: Good Shepherd Sisters
Facility: Dier el Ahmar Social Center
Location: Dier el Ahmar, Lebanon
What’s the biggest challenge a sister can face? An overwhelming humanitarian crisis—one that threatens to turn your entire community upside down.
That’s what happened to Sister Micheline Lattouff. With her fellow Good Shepherd Sisters, she had spent years running a center for the local poor in Dier el Ahmar, Lebanon. There, they provide schooling for the village’s children.
The surrounding farms have always drawn fieldworkers from neighboring Syria. But when civil war engulfed their homeland, that long tradition changed. Suddenly, the workers’ camp was, as Sister Micheline says, “full of children, women and elderly who had escaped from Syria and found refuge in the village.”
Everyone was huddled in “wet tents with rain leaking inside, the floor filled with mud without any heating. The children were around a wood fire in the snow with bare feet.”
The sisters raced to acquire tent material, warm clothes, shoes, food and heaters. Local Christians opened their homes, providing mattresses, blankets and supplies.
Soon, 1,400 families had poured in, overwhelming the village. But then Catholic Near East Welfare Association came through. As Sister Micheline explains, CNEWA’s donors “provided the refugees with food packages, winter kits and water supplies.”
She was troubled by seeing refugee children “trying to kill each other in war games, imitating the fighters in Syria.” So with more CNEWA funding, the sisters expanded their school program, providing focus for hundreds of traumatized girls and boys.
What will happen next? After dealing with the crisis head on, Sister Micheline is ready for whatever lies ahead.
“I feel very proud of the volunteering work provided by the whole community,” she says. “Now, when we visit the camp, we find that all families — Christian and non-Christian — became like one family, where members take care of each other.”
As war and natural disasters put more people at risk, the need for all of us to “take care of each other” is more important than ever. It’s why CNEWA is proud to support sisters like Sister Micheline. And it is why she hopes you can do the same.
Thousands of sisters. Millions of small miracles.
To support the good work of sisters throughout CNEWA’s world, click here. (And you can read the introduction to our series, for more information, too.)
For more about Sister Micheline and her work, check out Syria, Shepherds and Sheep from the Spring 2014 edition of ONE.