Days of Honor and Honesty

While growing up in Carlow, Ireland, Mary Ita Malone’s early dream to become a missionary in Africa led her to join a religious order. But as she was about to discover, life has a way of surprising all of us when we least expect it.

After Malone attended medical school in Dublin, she was assigned to Ortum Mission Hospital in West Pokot, Kenya, to bring medical services to the neglected indigenous people. Driven by her desire to provide preventive rather than curative care, Malone eventually earned a master’s degree in public health in America. But when her dreams of returning to Ortum to continue her work were dashed, Malone reveals how she worked through her internal struggles to teach at the medical school in Nairobi and eventually immigrate to the United States to specialize in physical medicine and rehabilitation.

In this fascinating memoir, a missionary nun and physician shares the true story of her tumultuous and exotic journey as she followed her guiding star from a Catholic religious order in Ireland to the far reaches of Africa and finally to America.