Featuring two books about Sister Maria Rosa Leggol's gutsy crusade to rescue, raise, and change the lives of tens of thousands of at-risk Honduran children.
One day in 1966, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a short, plump Catholic nun bent on funding her mission sprinted across the airport tarmac to stop a plane from taking off. On board was the country’s richest man. The help she received from him that day triggered a dramatic chain of events resulting in the rescue and education of more than 80,000 destitute children in the second- poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since then, the indomitable Sister Maria Rosa Leggol’s Sociedad Amigos de los Niños (SAN) organization has blossomed into a network of homes, schools, farms, clinics, and micro-businesses that empower poor Hondurans to live and work with dignity, breaking generational cycles of poverty.
One day in 1966, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a short, plump Catholic nun bent on funding her mission sprinted across the airport tarmac to stop a plane from taking off. On board was the country’s richest man. The help she received from him that day triggered a dramatic chain of events resulting in the rescue and education of more than 80,000 destitute children in the second- poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since then, the indomitable Sister Maria Rosa Leggol’s Sociedad Amigos de los Niños (SAN) organization has blossomed into a network of homes, schools, farms, clinics, and micro-businesses that empower poor Hondurans to live and work with dignity, breaking generational cycles of poverty.
One day in 1966, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, a short, plump Catholic nun bent on funding her mission sprinted across the airport tarmac to stop a plane from taking off. On board was the country’s richest man. The help she received from him that day triggered a dramatic chain of events resulting in the rescue and education of more than 80,000 destitute children in the second- poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Since then, the indomitable Sister Maria Rosa Leggol’s Sociedad Amigos de los Niños (SAN) organization has blossomed into a network of homes, schools, farms, clinics, and micro-businesses that empower poor Hondurans to live and work with dignity, breaking generational cycles of poverty.
Excerpt:
In Tegucigalpa, the capital city of Honduras, in 1966, a short, plump, middle-aged Catholic nun was hot on the heels of the richest man in the country. Sister Maria Rosa Leggol, a hospital nurse with a fifth-grade education, had no money, no social standing, no clout. What she did have was the audacity to ask big favors of powerful men and the unwavering conviction that her dream-to rescue, house, and raise, and educate street children-was sanctioned by God.
She also had the gall to think she could stop this man's airplane from taking off.
Sister Maria Rosa needed this man, a board member of her new child rescue project Sociedad Amigos de los Niños (SAN), to sign the mortgage for one of ten brand-new buildings she had commissioned from a local builder to house at-risk children.
“I ordered those ten homes, but I didn’t know I had to pay for them,” Sister Maria Rosa laughed when she told this story decades later. “I thought if I came to a big building company and said that I needed homes for poor children, they would just give it to me!”
She needed all of SAN’s board members—wealthy businessmen, media owners, and lawyers, the “movers and shakers” of Tegucigalpa—to pledge to contribute, but these friends in high places were unlikely to be found in their offices when she wanted something from them. This last man whose signature Sister Maria Rosa needed had slipped her grasp for weeks. Arriving by taxi that day at his home, she was told he was at the airport, about to jet off on a lengthy business trip.
“I could never find that guy, because businessmen spend more time on the plane than at home!” Sister Maria Rosa exclaimed, exasperated. “But this was the last day before the signatures were due, so I ran back to the taxi and asked the driver to drive me fast to the airport!”
When her taxi arrived at Toncontin Airport, Sister Maria Rosa hurried to the Departures desk. The agent informed her that all the passengers—including her board member—were already seated on the flight, the plane’s door was closed, and the pilot was ready for takeoff. She told the nun to turn around and go home.
Instead, Sister Maria Rosa took off running through the airport. Before any security guards could stop her, she plunged out onto the tarmac. There was a single DC-3 in motion, starting to taxi toward the airport’s lone asphalt runway. Out of breath, Sister Maria Rosa galloped toward the front of the jet, jumping and waving wildly at the pilot’s window, yelling, “Stop the plane!”
Incredibly, the plane slowed to a halt. As Sister Maria Rosa caught her breath, a flight attendant opened the door to the plane and lowered a stairway. Sister Maria Rosa hurried up into the plane, brandishing her mortgage papers and shouting the businessman’s name. The astonished man made his way forward and signed them. Later he said, “Who can say no to Sister Maria Rosa?”
“He didn’t even ask me what he was signing, so I gave him the papers for two homes,” Sister Maria Rosa chuckled. “Then I said thank you to the pilot and goodbye to everyone else. When I turned around to go down the stairs, there were policemen yelling at me, ‘You are not supposed to be there!’ So I thought quickly, then I turned around and blessed the plane with my arms in a big sign of the cross and told the people, ‘Here is the blessing I came to give you for your journey!’ After that I ran past the policemen to the taxi and we got out of there!”
As providence would have it, the pilot stopped the plane because he actually recognized Sister Maria Rosa down on the tarmac. Weeks earlier, his wife had delivered a baby at Tegucigalpa’s La Policlínica hospital, and Sister Maria Rosa had been her nurse.
“Can you see how God plans everything?” Sister Maria Rosa concluded. “Why did that pilot know me and stop the plane? Why did the man come forth and sign the papers for my homes? So that on the day they were due, all my mortgage and grant papers were signed and at the American Embassy! This was all in God’s plan.
“Money to start my project with? What is money to me?” she continued—a prophetic statement for her organization’s frequent financial struggles in the future. “If I start with money, then where is God?”
"Madre: The Nun Who Was Mother To The Orphans Of Honduras"
Madre: The Nun Who Was Mother to the Orphans of Honduras celebrates one fearless woman’s great goodness, charisma, and chutzpah in challenging endemic corruption and machismo for the sake of her country’s most vulnerable children. Always Room For One More: Wit and Wisdom From the Mother Teresa of Honduras, a companion volume to Madre, will feature more than 100 of Sister Maria Rosa’s quotes, quips, sayings and stories about essential life lessons like how to cherish children, how to help the poor, and how to discern God’s plan for your life.
“The elements of this book highlight the admirable work of a woman who embraced the crucifix… and worked to show the face of God in the midst of her every work…. I hope that the life and works of this servant of the Lord serve as an inspiration for every Christian and person of good will who feels called to do good for a more just society.”
—Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodriguez Maradiaga, S.D.B.,
Archbishop of Tegucigalpa
"Always Room For One More: Wit and Wisdom From the Mother Teresa of Honduras"
Always Room For One More: Wit and Wisdom From the Mother Teresa of Honduras, a companion volume to Madre, will feature more than 100 of Sister Maria Rosa’s quotes, quips, sayings and stories about essential life lessons like how to cherish children, how to help the poor, and how to discern God’s plan for your life.
Excerpt:
“To save these young children living on the city streets, you have to have strength and too much love to give each child all the love he has been missing since birth. You almost need to put them back into there womb to be born again, to help grow that dignity inside them.”
–Sister Maria Rosa Leggol
“Christ said, ‘Pick up your cross and follow Me.’ He did not say to drag it and complain!”
–Sister Maria Rosa
About the Author
Writer and mission trip leader Kathy Martin O’Neil sets the unlikely triumphs of this “Angel of the Poor” against the backdrop of Honduras’s deprivation, broken families, and gang violence that send desperate young migrants fleeing for their lives. Drawing from more than a decade of mission travel to SAN, she captures Sister Maria Rosa’s magnetic allure and Franciscan wisdom on how best to change hearts and stand with the marginalized people of the world.
