Farewell to an Inspiration: Sister Mary Vertucci

Annamaria on Monday

A woman who was a great inspiration to many has passed a few days ago. 

 Here is how the people who worked with her describe her: 

With both heavy hearts and deep gratitude, we share with you the passing of our beloved Founder and Director, Sr. Mary Vertucci, MM, on April 30, 2026.

Sr. Mary was more than a leader—she was a guiding light, a mentor, and a steadfast advocate for the dignity and potential of every young woman. For over five decades in Tanzania, she devoted her life to ensuring that girls, especially from pastoralist and hunter-gatherer communities, could access education and discover their own worth.

Through her vision, the Emusoi Centre became a place of hope—where young women are nurtured, empowered, and given the opportunity to build a brighter future. Her legacy is alive in every life she touched and in every dream she helped make possible.

Decades ago, a brief article in the Alumna News of the College of St. Elizabeth, our shared Alma mater, introduced me to her work. We had not know each other in school; she arrived there the fall after I graduated.  I got in touch with her then because I have cousins named Vertucci.  Little did I know that, though we did not share genes, she would change my life in significant ways.

Mary's work in Tanzania awakened me to the importance of her goals.  Before long, I had the great pleasure and privilege to visit her in Arusha.  There at the base of Kilimanjaro, I saw first hand the importance and urgency of her efforts, but also of how much joy Mary and her fellow missionary sisters took in their work.  Visiting there then and afterwords aways also filled me with joy.

Some readers of MIE may remember my story of the Italian who carved his name on a rock in Tanzania.  Sister Mary was the one who made it possible for me and my friend Nicoletta see that monument in person. 

Mary's work lives on in Emusoi in Tanzania and also in the generations and the progeny of Sister Mary's students.  As they go our into the world, her efforts and devotion continue to improve their lives and the lives of those around them.  The Emusoi girls become role models and champions for all the people of Tanzania and beyond.  

If you would like to contribute to the continuance of Mary's work, you can do so here.

• 
  Remembering Sr. Mary Vertucci: A Legacy of Faith, Education and Empowerment

  Every girl saved from a life of misery, who has instead a chance to develop and make something of herself may then go on to inspire others. You can help them along.

Africa 2019: Echos of Blogposts Past

Annamaria on Monday

My experiences in my recent travels hearken back to topics discussed here on MIE in the past, so by way of an update and a reminder, here are some recent photos that echo past posts.  Follow the links to the originals.

Here are some shots from my visit a couple of weeks ago to Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens in Cape Town.  I first read about that fabulous place in Stan's blog years ago.  These are just a few of the denizens of the smallest of the earth's six floral kingdoms.  Read Stan's blog about it here: Kirstenbosch

 

  

This past month, I also saw for the first time a magnificent view of the Rift Valley.  I had written about it and read about it, and didn't even know I was going to see it on my way from Nairobi to Naivasha.  As soon as it came into view outside the car window, I recognized it.  The Kikuyu Escarpment!  Here are a couple of my shots of the view.  You can read all about it here: Rift Valley

No trip to Africa is complete for me without a visit to the Emusoi Center in Arusha, Tanzania.  Here is a snapshot of my friend Nicoletta and me with the current group of new arrivals, and a few of the graduates who are acting as role models.

Bill and Melinda Gates, in their just released annual letter said, "Girls' education, especially,  is among the most powerful forces on the planet...In fact, UNESCO estimates that if all women in low- and middle-income countries finished secondary school, child mortality in those countries would fall by about half."  Here is link to one of my blogs on how Emusoi has been working toward this goal for over twenty years.  You can help too.

Regular readers of MIE may recall several blogs I have written about an inscription on a rock in Longido, Tanzani, made by an Italian prisoner of war.  Since Arusha is not that far from Longido, while I was at Emusoi, I paid a visit and saw the inscription for myself.  Here is how we found the man who made it.    

Speaking of Italian prisoners of war, that corniche road that gave us those magnificent views of the Rift Valley was built by prisoners.  Perhaps Elia was one of them.  When they finished the job, they asked for permission to build a Catholic church along the road.  Nicoletta and I found out about it from an Uber driver in Nairobi, so we asked the driver who took us to Naivasha to stop and let us have a look.

Once I was back in Florence after my sojourn in Africa, I received a most wonderful sculpture.  I have written here about the works of my friend Lorenzo Perrone, who make his works of art from books.  He made this one for me:

 

It is called Le Onde del Destino (The Waves of Desinty).  He said this to me when he delivered it: "The book is the dominant part because you are all about the book.  The little boat is you, sailing on with adventures.  Even though the waves are big, you are sailing on top of them."  What an incredible privilege to have an artist like Lorenzo make such a beautiful thing for me!  

A Car for Emusoi

Annamaria on Monday

 

HELP ME BUY THESE GIRLS A CAR!

The beautiful young women with me in the photo above are from pastoralist tribes in Tanzania, Africa.  In their culture, girls their age—between twelve and fourteen—can expect to undergo female circumcision and shortly thereafter be sold into marriage by their fathers or male guardians.  The men who take them in marriage are ordinarily around four times their age.  The bride price is typically in cows, but I have heard one story where the girl was twelve, the prospective husband fifty-seven, and the price a truckload of beer.

These girls come from remote villages that don’t have secondary schools.  Ordinarily, they would have no place in society, no way of surviving unless they accepted their traditional fate.  The Tanzanian Ministry of Education places pastoralist girls as one of the most disadvantaged groups in the country.  The marriages they are forced into often make them a third or fourth wife—at the mercy, not only of their husbands, but also of his older wives.

This is happening now.  Not in the Middle Ages.  Not a hundred years ago.  NOW!

What do you think?  Shall we do whatever we can to give these girls an alternative?  To help them finish their education and actualize their potential as human beings?  Shouldn’t we?

Thank you!  I thought you would say yes.

Let’s talk about how:

For the past twenty years, the Emusoi Centre in Arusha Tanzania has given pastoralist girls a new lease on life.  Through Emusoi, over fourteen hundred just such girls have finished their education.  They are now doctors, lawyers, accountants, teachers, and nurses.  Many have returned to their villages with their new capabilities.  Now, they provide medical care, education, and advocacy for their people.  But even more important—they are role models for the girls growing up around them.  And examples to all of what women can become.

Some of the girls in the picture ran away from their villages to Emusoi for the chance to go to school.  Some were taken there by mothers who risked beatings in order to give their daughters a better life than they have had.

So why do they need a car?

Emusoi is not a secondary school.  It is a refuge.  Once they take in the girls, the staff of Emusoi gives them remedial training to prepare them to succeed once they are admitted to further education.  The girls need the car so the staff can transport them to apply to schools, to take entrance examinations, and to move in once they are admitted.  Emusoi’s staff also uses the Centre’s car for rescue missions:  Sometimes, when a student goes home to her village for a visit, her father spirits her off in order to trade her away for some cows or for a wife for one of his sons.  The Emusoi staff then has to chase through the wilderness to find her so they can bring her back to school.  I am not making this up!

The car that provides for all these activities is now twenty years old, nearing the end of its useful life.

Girls needing rescue have to have a car that will get to them without breaking down.  Otherwise, they may be lost for good.  But also keep in mind that the Centre’s car transports them to medical appointments, brings in grocery shopping, all the things a family needs a car to do.

Before the old buggy becomes totally unreliable, help me replace it with a brand new one.

Emusoi is a big family. The car the girls need holds twelve, including the driver.  For $50,000, we can get them a 2018 Toyota Long Body Land Cruiser, built for Tanzania—to stand up to the bad roads (or no roads) one finds in wilderness areas.  

I am hoping to raise the entire amount and will match whatever donation you make by fifty percent. So your donation of $30 will become $45. Your $100 will become $150.  Your $1000 will become $1500.

Then, we will be able to buy them this!

 

This is your chance to improve the lives of girls and help them become the women of the future.  Please don’t pass it up.

Here is the link to a special fund set up on the Maryknoll Missionary website:

The link: https://www.maryknollsisters.org/featured-stories/emusoi-centre/

Note: In the "Prayer intentions/notes"  field, write "Emusoi Centre-vehicle/Sr. Mary Vertucci"*

To make your donations in the form of a check or money order, send to:

Maryknoll Sisters
Box 317
Maryknoll, NY 10545-0311
U.S.A

Please make checks payable to Maryknoll Sisters, New York with “Emusoi Center-vehicle” on the memo line. *

*Be sure to write in this notation, so that I can identify your donation and contribute another 50% in your name.



Every dollar you donate will go towards a car that will help transport these girls into the future they deserve.

THANK YOU!

The Good News from East Africa

I am sure most of you have heard of the recent tragic event on the Kenya-Somalia border, resulting in the deaths of 140 innocent people.  There are miscreants who are intent on breaking our hearts.  And then there are some heroes who are the antidotes to such poison, who spend their time trying to decrease the amount of misery on this beautiful planet.  Today I give you the words of one such person.

Sister Mary with Willy Chambullo, a neighbor and supporter of Emusoi

Sister Mary Vertucci of Somerset, NJ, joined the Maryknoll Sisters in 1964. She was assigned to Tanzania in 1971, where she taught chemistry at a secondary school for girls in Koroqwe. She served in the regional administration of the Maryknoll Sisters in Tanzania, after which she did vocation ministry for her congregation in 1982.

When she returned to Tanzania in 1987, Sister Mary got involved in youth work and education for girls. Her keen interest in empowering young women led her later on to participate as a research assistant for the Pastoral Research and Development Program, which does research in the field of education among the Maasai, a nomadic, pastoral people that continues to be marginalized in Tanzania.

in 1999, Sister Mary helped found Emusoi, which means "a place of discovery and awareness" in Maa, the Maasai language. The center aims to prepare school-age girls who grew up among nomadic peoples in Tanzania.

I have posted a couple of times in the past about Emusoi's work.  Here is a link describing my visit there last August:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2014/09/a-visit-to-emusoi-centre.html

I have just received Sr. Mary's monthly donor newsletter.  I always enjoy reading about what is happening with the Emusoi girls.  But this month's news from Emusoi was especially touching, given the horrific reports from Tanzania's neighbor to the north. With Sr. Mary's permission, I am reproducing her words to her supporters here.  I couldn't figure out how to download her photos, so I am putting in a few that I took during my visit.  If you want to help her girls, you can make a donation here.  I hope you will join me in doing so.

https://www.justgiving.com/4w350m3/donation/direct/charity/43411#MessageAndAmount

Stipulate Emusoi in your message when you do.

Annamaria - Monday

4 April 2015                                                                                                                                                       

Dear Friends,

I wish you a Happy Easter on this rainy Holy Saturday morning. Hopefully, spring is coming to many of you in the States and the cold winter is finally abating.  Here in Tanzania, we are in the middle of the long rainy season, so the dry brown earth is all green now with revived grass.  The people are planting and all over you see shoots of green corn plants peeking out of the ground.  You surely get a sense of new life and resurrection.

But then elsewhere in the world, all you hear about is death and destruction.  We here in Tanzania are grieving for our neighbors in Kenya who have suffered the death of over 140 young students.  It feels very close to home as I realize many of those students are the same age as our older students who are with us. When I think of all the sacrifices parents have made to enable their children to attend University and all those young lives with gifts for the future development of humankind just cut off, my heart is filled with sorrow.  I wonder where new life and resurrection are.

But now I am in my office on Holy Saturday morning and I hear the cheerful voices of our students as they wash their clothes and do “big” cleaning of all the rooms in the Center.  They are happy and safe and enjoying themselves.  The number of our resident students has tripled this week as many schools have closed for 2 weeks of mid-term break.  So instead of 50 residents, we now have 150! They are all happy to see their friends as girls come to us from more than 20 different schools.  Some are meeting for the first time.  They are exchanging tales of their schools, sitting and studying together, sharing what they have learned in their different schools.

Happy to be at Emusoi

This week they received an unexpected gift—eggs.  Our neighbor, Willy Chambulo, Managing Director of Kibo Guides/Tanganyika Wilderness Camps, gave us 20 trays of fresh eggs.  He has a farm producing eggs for all his tourist camps, but the numbers of tourists this quarter have declined due to fears of Ebola and terrorists, and there is an oversupply of eggs.  Our students have benefited from this bad luck.  Many of them probably have not eaten eggs because it is difficult to raise chickens in the Maasai homesteads. So this was really a treat for them.  No one refused and all ate their hard-boiled eggs with relish and they will continue to eat them during this holiday break!

You all are contributing to the joy and safety that these girls experience when you donate to Emusoi.  I want to thank you for the contributions you made in February.  Because of your help, these girls have a chance for education rather than being married at the young age of 13 or 14.  If Emusoi did not exist, 95% of these girls would be married with children. 

In Maasai households, the responsibility for finding food for the children rests on the mother.  So these young girls, now mothers with children, would have to struggle to feed their children, instead of having the chance to develop their gifts and potentials through education.  These girls whom you are helping with go on to become the future teachers, nurses, doctors, accountants, lawyers and maybe even engineers and contribute to their families and communities.  In my mind, helping a project like Emusoi, adds to the goodness in the world which outweighs all the evil and destruction that we hear about in the news.  It is a way to build peace and harmony as girls live their lives in joy and freedom, getting a chance to be children and grow up in a safe, supportive environment.

I thank you again for your faithful support and know that you are adding to the goodness in the world at the Easter season—goodness that counteracts the death and destruction in the world and builds peace and harmony as you help these girls who have no where else to turn. You are all remembered in our prayers everyday.  Happy Easter!

With peace,

Sr. Mary Vertucci

A Visit to Emusoi Centre

Arusha, Tanzania:

I have written before about Emusoi and its work educating Maasai girls.  You can find that post from about year ago here:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/emusoi-arusha-tanzania.html

On my recent trip to Africa, I had the privilege of visiting and meeting first hand the girls and the women who educate and care for them.  What a joyful experience!

Happy me and the girls!

I wanted to let you hear these happy girls sing and see them dance, but Google won't let me upload my two-minute film, so you will have to wait until I can put it on YouTube.

Here they are the next day, with Mama Salome, the matron who is surrogate mother to them all, watching my film of the performance.

Saturday Chores: a trio of young cooks

 

Another Saturday job, to empty many sacks of dried corn into the storage container where it will be safe from the critters.  The transfer was all done with a bucket line, lots of shouted encouragements, and laughter.

While there, I stayed with the sisters in their convent.  The 

milk for my morning coffee came out of this bottle.  I called

the photo "Still Life in the Convent."  Sister Maureen Meyers

response: "Yes, there is still life in the convent."

The sisters who run the school and one of the seven dogs that they have rescued.

Without Emusoi, the girls you see in these pictures would have been sold into marriage somewhere around thirteen years of age, in exchange for goats or cattle or, in one case, for a truckload of beer.  Often their mothers or grandmothers have suffered awful violence for helping their daughters and granddaughters to escape so that they can finished their education.  Many Emusoi girls have gone on to become nurses and doctors, teachers and lawyers, accountants who serve in the Tanzanian Ministry of Finance.  Many return to their villages and serve their communities.  One of them, was part of the Tanzanian delegation to the recent White House Conference on Africa.

Please join me in support of these brave girls and the generous women who help them.  You can do that here:

https://www.maryknollsisters.org/catalog/?pid=8&cid=

Annamaria - Monday