CREESLOUGH
CRAOSLOC

SR. JOAN

Sr.Joan Agnes Mc Fadden

Sacret Heart House, 

Johannesburgh, 

South Africa,

Sr. Joan feeding Frans Mhlaba 

a 29 - year old terminally ill man from Zimbabwe.

Sr.Joan has served in South Africa for over forty years with the Good Shepard Sisters. Nursing the sick, holding clinics out in the bush, She has been a midwife delivering many children born in the Homelands, she has provided information to the old and sick on how to claim state benefits etc. fed and clothed the down-and –out on the street.

Sr.Joan served her three years noviciate in France. At the time when she was Professed was not allowed home again. She also trained as a State Registered Nurse in London, England where fortunately for her, her father Dominick and her two brothers Jimmy and Anton were working at that time. Fatima House Pretoria in the Province of the Transvaal South Africa it is the Home of the Good Shepard Sisters (not unlike Ireland). It is also the home for The Old Ladies, The Young Expectant Mothers, The Loyal Workers and a retreat house for the nuns on return.

When Sr. Joan (Agnes) joined the Good Shepherd Sisters for “The Foreign Missions”. I think it came as a surprise to her father and mother and all her family. She was in the middle of the family with six older and six younger, six brothers and six sisters. On her first visit home after joining the nuns, her mother Maggie was still teaching her how to pray, to God through the Sacred Heart of Jesus, (She could even teach the nuns how to pray).But her father Dominick while working out in the fields stopped and made her promise that if she did not like the convent “that she would come straight home”.

Sr.Joan (Agnes) memories of her home in Killoughcarron Creeslough were of working on the farm, being afraid to milk the kicking cow and getting her younger sister Mary to help out. Playing and Praying around the Mass Rock and singing the song “Farr Away Places” (With Strange Sounding Names Keep Calling Calling Me) Her father talking about Tibet and the Dal-e-Lama, and saying the family rosary for that great man Mahat Ghandi a Hindu and pacifist from India when he was assassinated.