Print Issue: September 26, 2002

Sister Peggy Ryan 'At Home' Working In The Latino Community

By Erika Anderson, Staff Writer

ATLANTA - Sister Peggy Ryan, OP, feels selfish. A member of the Sinsinawa Dominican order who serves as a community social worker in the Hispanic community in Atlanta, Sister Ryan said that she has gotten so much out of her work, she feels like she receives more than she gives.

"I just feel that my motives are really selfish because I receive so much," she said. "Hopefully I am more hospitable, more faithful, more prayerful and am learning to put tasks aside and people first, just because I'm here."

She just turned 45, but with the enthusiastic grin of a teenager, Sister Ryan defies her age.

She grew up in Chicago in a family of nine children. She has an identical twin sister.

"I have two parents who were loving, faithful, prayerful adults, and I had the privilege of a wonderful education from the Sinsinawa Dominicans, who had such a welcoming, joyful spirit," she said.

Sister Ryan entered the order at the age of 23. It's not important why she entered, she said, but why she stayed.

"I have had amazing reasons to leave in my life, but I'm here because of a saying we have in our congregation - at the heart of everything is relationship. The relationship I have with this congregation can never be broken."

She first came to Atlanta in 1994 and served here for alomst two years before leaving to serve as co-director of the Dominican apostolic volunteer program.

In 1999, Sister Ryan, a licensed clinical social worker in the state of Georgia, returned to her current area of ministry. She works with children in their families, in a county clinic geared toward providing mental health care for children in Spanish. For confidentiality reasons, the clinic cannot be named.

"I love visiting with a child and watching them grow in awareness of their gifts," she said.

Sister Ryan studied Spanish for two months in Guatemala and for three months in Mexico. Besides just the language, she feels she has learned much from the Latino community.

"I have seen great hospitality, great humor and incredible faith. The Latino community is like a house and they've invited me in to stay," she said. "I don't see myself at all as giving. This is a very mutual relationship."

A parishioner of Our Lady of the Americas Mission, Doraville, Sister Ryan feels that "as a church, we are being called to welcome the stranger and the newcomer around us." Welcoming members of the Latino community can start simply, she said, by hanging a picture in the church of an important saint in their culture, or by having Masses in their own language.

"One of our adult jobs is to become the people that God intended us to be," she said. "Every day I get to meet and work with people who are there. These are people who are millions of miles from home and bumping every day into strangeness and unfamiliarity, but they are just so real."

She said that in "walking hand in hand with another culture, your own culture is put in front of you like a mirror."

"I've seen the materialism, violence, prejudice and discrimination (in my own culture)," she said. "I have to hold truth in front of me as the ideal. That's all I can do."

She said that being embraced by the Latino community has taught her humility.

"It's humbling to be so accepted by this community," she said. "Especially considering how our country treats newly arrived immigrants."

Above all, Sister Ryan feels her life is truly blessed.

"I just feel like every day is a gift," she said.