By Rita McInerney

Even after Sister Mary Sponsa slipped in the mud and broke an ankle early in August, she had no intention of leaving her 28 children at Our Lady of Fatima Rehab Center in Cape Palmas, Liberia.

By Aug. 15, the leg was swollen and was giving her a lot of trouble. She was told she would have to find a good doctor. For that she had to go to the neighboring country, the Ivory Coast.

The ferry that carries passengers from Cape Palmas over the Cavally River to the Ivory Coast had been destroyed by President Samuel Doe's soldiers. Sister Sponsa, her bad leg wrapped in a towel and wearing a sneaker on her good foot, and a companion sister were taken over the deep river in a canoe.

Shortly after, the rebels arrived in Las Palmas. "We got out just in time," she admits.

On Aug. 16 she took the doctor's advice and was lucky to get a seat on an Iberian airlines jet bound for Spain and New York. Most of the passengers were missionaries from Liberia.

She was able to make arrangements with SMA father from Italy to take care of her 28 children. Under the care of Italian sisters, they are living in a retreat center the priests made available at their Ivory Coast mission.

She arrived back in the U.S. about two weeks ago and is now staying with her sister, Angie Cebulski in Snellville. She has discarded a walker and is able to go about to parishes, thanking donors.

When the civil war started early in 1990, her children began praying an extra rosary each day for peace. Horror tales were rife about President Doe's barbarous treatment of both children and adults.

By May government solders were confiscating cars from Catholic missioners, breaking into warehouses and stealing food.

Missionaries around the country were being harassed by both Government soldiers and rebel fighters. Soon, most of the missions were in ruins. A Catholic hospital in Monrovia, the capital where most of the bloody fighting raged, was in ruins.

A vocational school near Cape Palmas run by Salesian Fathers was forced to close in May after Doe's troops confiscated all of the computers and tools used to teach trades to the youth. Then the school was turned into a refugee center for people fleeing Monrovia.

Many Catholic missions, Sister Sponsa said, were targets for the rebels. They took them over as headquarters and made use of their up-to-date communications equipment.

By July, attendance at the parish church in Las Palmas was down to a handful of worshippers. It holds 800 people. Immigrants from Sierra Leone, Ghana and Guinea gave up their shops, fishing boats, and jobs and returned to their own countries.

By then the stockpile of food the Bernardine sister had been able to collect because of "the goodness of people in Atlanta," had dwindled. She and the children continued to pray. She resisted efforts of the local bishop to get her to leave when some of the other sisters left.

Sister Sponsa, 65, loves Liberia and the people. A nurse, she first went to Cape Palmas in 1970 and remained there until 1977 when an eye ailment forced her return to the U.S. She finally went back to Cape Palmas in 1986 and began treating scores of people daily at Sacred Heart Clinic.

After a two-month visit home in 1988, she returned to Cape Palmas and began salvaging children. The youngsters she seeks out are unable to stand and walk, considered "witched" by their families and native society. Polio or birth defects have left them helpless.

In "African science," sister Sponsa says, such children are a stigma on the family. They are abandoned in hospitals or left uncared for and unschooled in their homes.

"I wanted to prove they were handicapped from polio, not from 'witching.' I wanted to prove they could function, that they could learn to work with their hands."

She had lots of opposition, even from the local bishop. She went in to homes, to the city hospital and brought the children back to the Bernardine sisters' mission.

"I would go around picking up kids. None of them could stand or walk when I met them."

Two years later, about 30 have gone back to their families, rehabilitated, able to work, to take their place in the world that had rejected them.

"People are beginning to see that it works," she says.

Before the civil war shut the schools, all of her children went to the regular Catholic elementary school. They speak and study in English. "They did well. Many are at the head of the class."

One boy, Victor, about 15, went through four grades, beginning with first, in about 18 months.

She persuaded the local pastor to let the children sing before the Sunday Mass. Reluctantly he agreed. When the priest and the congregation heard them they asked them to come back. Now the children sing at all kinds of programs, in both English and their tribal languages.

Our Lady of Fatima Rehab Center was dedicated last October. Mrs. Cebulski was able to be there. As sister Sponsa's accountant, she tries to keep her from overspending for the children. "She always owes the merchants money," Mrs. Cebulski says.

"I believe in prayer," her sister answers. It hasn't failed her in her quest to bring hope to children. Braces, walkers, wheelchairs, medicines, foods, even pretty dresses for the little girls, are made possible by generous friends of the center.

She also had benefactors in Tulsa, OK, where her brother, Bishop Eusebius Beltran presides over the diocese. Two other brothers are in this area. Father Joseph Beltran is pastor of St. Oliver Plunkett in Snellville, and Frank is an Atlanta attorney.

The Bernardine sister is sad for the people of devastated Liberia. Yet, her faith and love sustain her determination to help them.

Besides, "I have a good time," she admits.