Nuns' efforts aid Florida farmworkers

[The Straight Story]

Nuns' efforts aid Florida farmworkers

By Kate Santich

Orlando Sentinel

(MCT)

ORLANDO, Fla. - It sounds like the plotline for a reality-TV show: Four young, idealistic women leave their big-city homes to move to the rural South, where they become the only white people living on the poor, black side of town. They try to save the world, or at least their little corner of it.

They work as orange pickers, teachers, translators, radio-show hosts, grant writers and even managers of a Mexican restaurant. One gets beaten, another mugged, and a third nearly dies and has to have quintuple-bypass surgery. They hold children in their arms, dance, lead a massive immigration-rights march and try to solve gang violence.

And they pray. There is lots of praying.

Except this is not reality TV - just reality. And it has endured far longer than a Nielsen-ratings period - far longer, really, than anyone ever expected, even the women themselves.

In the once-rural city of Apopka, the four Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur have been offering hope, healing and hard work for more than 30 years, having answered a call for help from the Catholic Diocese of Orlando, Fla., to serve the poor and largely Hispanic migrants who work the fields and plant nurseries.

http://www.fortwayne.com/mld/newssentinel/living/15020445.htm