In 1970 a new phase of education began for me. I was elected to the Central Team in Rome and found myself being stretched not only by my Roman community, but by my sisters in forty countries on every continent. Many of my sisters were "totally apostolic" as they struggled to make the Kingdom come, laying down their lives for their friends and doing it freely because that is what God asks, and doing it daily because that is what life asks. Their story is another book, but their lives and example changed my life as did our travels to all the countries where the Society is at work. Our first visit was' to India and Egypt, where both the beauty and the need of the people overwhelmed me, perhaps the latter more so since I am from the first world. In Egypt we visited a hut, where a woman lay with her new-born child sleeping in a hole in the ground. She looked too old to me to have children, so you can imagine my astonishment and dismay to discover that she was twenty-four years old and had already lost her first six children. In this hut women's health became an issue for me. On the banks of the Nile where genital mutilation is common, women's oppression took on new meaning. Clearly I was just beginning my education. Yet, despite all, what always gave me hope in these years was the strength of these women and the faith of the people met, their desire to live life to the full and to share whatever they had with each other. Once, a member of a Christian Community in Brazil looked at the five of us from different countries and said: "Ah, at last, a world united!".
