Sister Marta Yach Cosme walked through a garden at the motherhouse of the Missionary Sisters of the Eucharist, touching the fronds of the ubiquitous plants and squeezing the herbs with the tips of her fingers, explaining their medicinal purposes.
“We have to have that knowledge of medicinal plants because we go to very distant areas where you can’t get a doctor,” Sister Marta explained about her congregation’s ministry in the highlands of western Guatemala.
For many reasons, including war, discrimination against Indigenous people and poverty, it’s almost a miracle that Sister Marta is there at all, walking among the congregation’s beloved gardens. She certainly never saw herself that way, growing up as an Indigenous woman in nearby Panajachel.
Yet God makes great things happen, said Sister Marta told Global Sisters Report. She is now the leader of a congregation of 49 Indigenous sisters, founded in 1975 in the middle of Guatemala’s civil conflict by Sister Tonia Maria Orland, a member of the US-based Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
The congregation didn’t just survive the violence of the Lake Atitlán region back then, but flourished during the war’s 36 years. It now has missions in San Pedro Ayampuc; Tamahu; Cobán; Santiago Atitlán in Sololá; Tecpán in Chimaltenango; Joyaba and Santa Cruz in El Quiché; and San Andrés Semetabaj.
