“Mercy is the name of God, We are the agents of Change. If we don’t do this work, who will?” Pope Francis
Every year, for the past 13 years, nearly 100 young students and their chaperones gather in the great city of Philadelphia for the Mercy Girl Effect- Student Leadership Conference. Among the gathering/s are schools from the North of Ireland, as well as students from across the USA: New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California, Michigan, Nebraska, Rhode Island, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland.
The Mercy Girl Effect is a “mercying” movement founded over 25 years ago as the Girls Leadership Conference. In 2007, we rebranded ourselves to become the Mercy Girl Effect, affiliated with UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Organization in association with the Working Group on Girls. The conference, which is an annual event, is an attempt to encourage our younger Mercy citizens to think big, collaborate, network, share and consult with each other on how we can help build a world fit for all.
Some of the participants at the Philadelphia Conference
Each year, the conference begins by recognizing that we stand on the shoulders of a giant- Catherine McAuley the woman who founded the great enterprise that is Sisters of Mercy.
During the conference the students are given up-to-date information from a member of the New York based UNICEF team, highlighting the situation and plight of girls worldwide. Violence against the girl child is perpetuated on every continent, wielded by every social and economic class, and sanctioned to varying degrees by every form of government, every major religion and every kind of communal and familiar structure.
Facilitated with this knowledge, the students are then helped to develop their own particular leadership strengths and gifts through engaging in a daylong Myers-Briggs workshop. Recognizing that knowledge and information are best put into action through teamwork, participants share stories, events, and service activities from each of our schools. This in turn leads naturally into our focus for a collective ACTION.
Information is shared at the conference from our Sisters working on the frontlines and students are then invited to look at how we as a group can respond and collaborate with our mercy brothers and sisters in various parts of the world.
Sr. Denise Coughlan (Australia) at the new school built in Cambodia
To date, the Mercy Girl Effect has provided significant funding for small school builds (7 schools in total), scholarships, provision of uniforms and clinics in Sudan, Zambia, Nigeria, Cambodia and Kenya to name a few of the joint projects undertaken.
This past year, even with the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 global pandemic our joint project, the “Laudato Tree” project inspired by “Laudato Si”, Pope Francis’ 2015 letter on the environment, which promotes its key message, that “everything is interconnected and interdependent”. (LS 91), we raised nearly $35,000 towards the “green” wall right across the African continent just below the Sahara Desert.
New School Uniforms from our Mercy school in Nuba, Sudan with uniforms provided by St. Mary’s National School Stranolar and Dooish National Schools in Donegal
During this new academic school year, with all of the challenges and limitations imposed on our schools by the ongoing pandemic, the Mercy Girl Effect teams are once again on board with our new project – That Comfortable Cup of Tea, which invites students and our wider Mercy family to examine and explore the origins of that tea and at the same time examine what kind of comfort Catherine intended when she asked us to comfort one another?
Recently, Pope Francis addressed the issue of abuse and tea pickers, many of whom are young girls who live in devastatingly difficult conditions. Sadly the conditions are so desperate that parents are targets of human traffickers and modern-day slave traders who offer $50 for a child. Because of their crushing poverty and total inability to provide for their children, many parents “sell” their children to these human traffickers who promise a “better life” for them.
During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which has shut down the tea garden work in various parts of the world, the young girl-child tea pickers, who harvest tea for markets all across the globe, have found themselves out of work, cut off from their families with no access to food or supplies.
This year, working in collaboration with Arise the anti-human trafficking foundation these young and very vulnerable girl workers are being provided with food and facemasks, as well as being taught about how COVID-19 spreads and how to prevent it.
I have no doubt that our Mercy schools will once again rise to the challenge recognizing that…
“We Rise By Lifting Others”
Photographs by Srs. Deirdre Mullan and Cathy Solano
Deirdre Mullan rsm
Northern Province
