Sister Cecilia Gros

I am Sister Cecilia Gros. I was born in San Antonio, Texas, and I entered the congregation of the School Sisters of Notre Dame in 1966. In 1968, I made my first profession and received my B.A in 1970. It was then that I began a 13-year career of teaching first grade. During the summers of those years, I also earned my M.Ed. Then in 1983, I had a change of career. I studied nursing at Charity Hospital School of Nursing in New Orleans,  followed by a semester of tropical medicine at Tulane School of Tropical Medicine.

I arrived in Ghana in April 1987 and began my ministry at Notre Dame Clinic after three months of living with a Ghanaian family to learn the culture and one of the languages. The people who come to the clinic speak four different languages: Ga, Twi, Ewe, and Hausa. Over the past 20 years I have learned to understand most of what the patients say; however, I tend to confuse all of the languages when I try to speak, and so I have a Ghanaian assistant with me to translate.

Each day, we treat an average of 150 or more patients. Most of them are suffering from malaria, respiratory infections, anemia, skin diseases, hypertension and injuries. We also have two well trained midwives who do deliveries at the clinic. We opened a new maternity ward in January 2011, and since then the number of women coming to deliver has more than doubled. Our goal is in line with the Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations to reduce the incidence of maternal and neonatal deaths, since many women still deliver at home on dirt floors.