When Sister Ann Fox first set foot in Rwanda in 2002, she was already revered back home, where she had guided and elevated the lives of children, youths, and mothers in Jamaica Plain and South Boston.
What she saw in Rwanda, though, went beyond the economic challenges faced by those she helped in Boston. The African nation was still shaken and recovering from the 1994 genocide, when some 800,000 people were viciously slaughtered in 100 days.
“I looked at the faces of the people I met in Rwanda, and I realized that the American leadership and the Catholic Church had really let them down,” Sister Ann told the Boston Globe in 2008. “I had to do something. I couldn’t just walk away.”
Returning to Rwanda repeatedly over the next two decades, she became the driving force behind building of the Maranyundo Girls School, which now provides opportunities to students in grades 7 to 12 that were unreachable before the nun from South Boston arrived. “I never thought about how I was going to do this,” recalled Sister Ann, for whom nothing seemed impossible.
As her health failed, she spent her last months in Rwanda, where she used proceeds from selling her house in Southie to help found a final nonprofit so others could carry on the work she supported.
On Saturday, which would have been her 90th birthday, a funeral Mass was said in St. Monica Church in South Boston for Sister Ann, who died in Rwanda on Aug. 30 and was buried there in October.
The altar at St. Monica’s, a friend said, was decorated with flowers sent from Rwanda.
“She was like a living saint,” said Barry T. Hynes, a former Boston City Council president who launched the Paraclete Center in South Boston with her and found that she changed his life, as she did with all she met.
“The spirit of the Lord shone from her face,” said Hynes, a son of former Boston mayor John Hynes. “I’m a better person for having met her. I’m a more spiritual person and a more loving person and a more giving person. And I’m not an unusual case. Everyone around her was affected the same way.”
Among the friends Sister Ann asked to accompany her to Nyamata, Rwanda, home of the Maranyundo school, was Ellen Contreras, who taught languages in the Brookline Public Schools. At Sister Ann’s urging, Contreras was a volunteer teacher at the Paraclete Center and during trips to Rwanda.
“It wasn’t easy to say no to Sister Ann. You didn’t even attempt to,” Contreras said. “She certainly set the bar high and also showed us that it’s not difficult to reach.”
Sister Ann “took her duty in life to lift people up, to walk with them, to be there for them, very, very seriously,” Contreras said “and no matter what she felt she was able to give, she pushed and pushed and pushed herself and made it look easy.”
Years before beginning her Rwanda outreach, Sister Ann had arrived in the late 1960s in Boston, where she helped find job opportunities for mothers in Jamaica Plain’s Bromley-Heath housing project who received welfare assistance.
Then she was executive director of South Boston Neighborhood House, a community nonprofit that offers programs to people of all ages. In the late 1990s, Sister Ann and Hynes were principal founders of the Paraclete Center in South Boston, which provided after-school enrichment programs for children until closing for good during the pandemic.
At each place, Sister Ann invited others to hear the call that drew her to help others.
Melissa Peery of Arlington, Va., who became an adopted niece through her close friendship with one of Sister Ann’s nieces, was among many who traveled with her to Rwanda.
“When I went to Rwanda, I immediately fell in love with it, saw the remarkable things she was doing there, and wanted to be part of it,” Peery said.
At the October burial service in Rwanda, Peery spoke of how Sister Ann, in a relentless, gentle way, encouraged those she knew to make a difference in the world.
“It was always an invitation,” Peery said. “And if you didn’t accept it, and she thought it would be really valuable to you, she’d invite you again. She seemed to create this incredible network just through issuing these invitations to come and learn something new and meet different people.”
The second of three sisters, Jeralee Ann Fox was born on Dec. 16, 1933, in Jackson, Mich., and was known as Jeri when she was a girl.
She was entering adolescence when her parents divorced. Her mother, Mary Barnum Fox, was a secretary for a real estate agent. Her father, Homer Elmer Fox, held construction and handyman jobs.
Mary and her three daughters lived in a house in Scio Township, just outside Ann Arbor.
“We had a garden and we had fruit trees, so we all had to learn how to grow food and pick food and can food,” said the youngest of the three sisters, Sandra Lazarus of Apopka, Fla.
Sister Ann had no trouble learning anything.
“Jeri was a genius,” Sandra said. “Her IQ was tested in fourth or fifth grade. The teacher thought she was pretty smart and it turned out she was a genius.”
While at the University of Michigan, from which she graduated in 1955 with a bachelor’s degree, Sister Ann converted to Catholicism, and later did graduate work at Fordham University in the Bronx, N.Y.
“My mother always said we could join whatever church we wanted to as long as we knew what we were doing,” her sister said, “and Jeri obviously knew what she was doing.”
In New York, she counseled parents whose children had intellectual disabilities, and in 1961 took vows as a nun. In the wake of changes brought about by Vatican II, Sister Ann’s religious community wanted to become more conservative, and she didn’t. Eventually, she began living at Bromley-Heath and ran educational programs for disadvantaged mothers.
“She created and did so many wonderful things that nobody thought could happen, but she did it,” said her sister, who is Sister Ann’s only immediate survivor.
Sister Ann’s involvement with Rwanda began after she participated in a Women Waging Peace program at the Harvard Kennedy School in 1999. At the conference she met Aloisea Inyumba, a government official in Rwanda who invited her to see the country.
Linda Schwabe, a friend who volunteered teaching the Kids Can Cook program at Paraclete, was with Sister Ann during that first 2002 visit.
“The trip was breathtakingly beautiful and transformative in a very spiritual way,” Schwabe said. “She was a woman of faith, but also one of the most pragmatic people in the world. She immediately saw where something could be built and could make a life-changing contribution not only to the area it was built in, but to the country as a whole.”
Sister Ann kept creating to the end, using funds from selling her Boston home to found Rwandan Women Rising, a nonprofit that supports the work in Rwanda and East Africa of the Benebikira Sisters, with whom she spent her final months.
“Her love and kindness changed the lives of many people in Rwanda. Her smile promoted harmony,” Sister Augusta Mukarugomoka of the Benebikira Sisters wrote in an email. While living with the sisters, Sister Ann “was a mother, a teacher, and adviser for everybody.”
Sister Ann “offered an antidote to what is wrong with this world,” said Contreras, her friend from Brookline. “Day to day there are miracles in our lives, and you look at her and think, ‘Yes, they are possible.’ "
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.