Marj Humphrey, Former CW Editor, Heads to East Africa on Restorative Justice Mission

by Jennifer Tomshack

This article first appeared on the Maryknoll Lay Missioners website and is reprinted here with the permission of the author.

According to archeology, humans first learned how to intentionally light fire in Africa about 1 million years ago, and it was a key factor in our social and biological evolution. The symbolism of fire—signifying vitality, transformation, and God’s presence—is likewise prehistoric, and a contributor to our spiritual evolution.

Fire is an apt metaphor for Marj Humphrey’s experience of mission in East Africa that shined so brightly.

After 20 years in Kenya and Southern Sudan and nearly another 20 back in the United States, the returned missioner is returning to mission this year to tend the fire in her heart that never dimmed. 

Retirement—from her role as Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ director of missions in 2022, a position she held for six years—wasn’t suiting her, she says.

Marj loved overseeing the missioners and trying to ensure they had the support and resources necessary for their ministries, along with traveling to various projects and learning from their incredible work. “It was a real learning experience and very humbling to see the things that missioners are doing around the world,” she says.

But she admits, “I’m not an administrator by nature. The greatest joy of my life was being on the ground in East Africa. I took a trip there on my own last year just to kind of see… At my age, am I still able to do this? And I found that I can. So I decided that I was going to.”

The other thing that stirred her desire to return was the organization’s decision in 2022 to make its official focus nonviolence—through prevention, intervention, reconciliation, and restoration of all creation. “When Maryknoll Lay Missioners adopted nonviolence as its focus, I wanted to go back and contribute in that area,” she says.

Her ministry this time will be different than the healthcare service she provided before, but it will still be a healing ministry. She plans to begin her new work there in restorative justice in Uganda before eventually going to Kenya.

The first spark

Marj’s journey began about as far from East Africa as a person can get—in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. But from the very beginning of her young adulthood, she was, unbeknownst to her, laying the groundwork for her future on another continent.

Born and raised in Idaho, she moved to Spokane, Washington to attend college. She earned a bachelor’s degree in communications and religious studies and a masters degree in education from Gonzaga University. She studied to become a physician assistant at St. Vincent Catholic Medical Center in Staten Island, New York.

Marj taught journalism and religion at Gonzaga Preparatory School in Spokane and coordinated the student community service program there. She worked as a physician assistant at Bellevue Hospital in New York City, in a clinic for homeless people. In Idaho and Washington, she worked as a physician assistant in community health centers that served uninsured and underinsured patients. 

Fanning the flames

Her vocation as a missioner started to emerge during her years in New York City, when she was drawn to the Catholic Worker movement, a collection of communities that was founded in New York City by Dorothy Day in 1933. Catholic Worker communities, which have since spread all over the world, aim to “live in accordance with the justice and charity of Jesus Christ” and provide hospitality to those on the margins of society.

Marj lived and worked in the New York City Catholic Worker community from 1976 to 1984. Marj knew Dorothy, who died in 1980, and served as an editor for her legendary Catholic Worker newspaper. “Dorothy Day’s commitment to nonviolence has always been an important part of my life,” says Marj.

It was during this formative period that Marj met three Maryknoll Sisters who lived in a tenement in Alphabet City, a Manhattan neighborhood then known for poverty and crime.

Marj was deeply influenced by their ministry, and one of them in particular, Sister Mary Mercy Hirschboeck, became a role model to her. Sister Mercy was the first Maryknoll Sister to become a doctor, and she had served as a physician in Korea and Bolivia.

The sisters were joyfully doing difficult work past retirement age—and Marj is still emulating them. 

Enlightened impact

From these sisters, Marj learned about the Maryknoll Lay Missioners, and in 1987 she became one.

Marj found her place in Kenya’s rural clinics. There, amid the challenges of remote healthcare delivery, she further honed her skills as a physician assistant, providing care in makeshift clinics and hospitals that often lacked basic resources. She spent about a year and a half in Southern Sudan working with other Maryknoll lay missioners on a medical team in camps for displaced people, before returning to Kenya.

Some of Marj’s most impactful work occurred during the peak of Africa’s HIV/AIDS epidemic, at the Kitale AIDS Program in Western Kenya, which she joined in 2000. During this period, she faced skepticism about introducing antiretroviral treatments—which had become standard treatment in the developed world—to a community that lacked resources and reliable healthcare infrastructure. Many doubted the capability of patients there to adhere to strict medication regimens, fearing that failures could lead to drug resistance. 

Yet, Marj was undeterred, inspired by the pioneering work of the internationally known Dr. Paul Farmer, who provided her with a simple yet effective plan for managing an AIDS clinic.

With Farmer’s guidance, Marj and her team ran a successful HIV/AIDS clinic that saved and changed lives. “We were seeing hundreds of people, who as one of my medical friends put it, had ‘one foot in the grave,’ return to healthy, productive lives,” she reflected in an article about this experience. “Children who were HIV-positive gained weight and recovered their energy so rapidly that we were astounded and overjoyed to see them resume a much more normal childhood.”

Rekindled purpose

Marj returned to the United States in 2007 to care for her elderly parents. But she never lost her ties to mission, immediately joining the Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ board of directors until she became director of missions.

Now she yearns to reconnect with her deepest happiness in the communities that shaped her—and to join the ranks of Maryknoll lay missioners in “justice and peace” ministries. 

All Maryknoll lay missioners strive to create a more just and compassionate world through focusing on the needs of people experiencing poverty or marginalization. Some missioners, however, have a special focus on peace or justice through ministries that train leaders in conflict resolution, assist groups working for human rights, promote interreligious dialogue, advocate for and work with groups experiencing marginalization as they strive for equity and inclusion, and support local efforts to dismantle racism, classism, and sexism.

Restorative justice—and with it, forgiveness and reconciliation—is one of these “justice and peace” ministries.

The practice of restorative justice is a different approach to dealing with the impacts of violence. Rather than justice as punishment, restorative justice seeks to heal both victims and perpetrators as individuals or whole communities.

Africa has been a place of some of the most stunning examples of restorative justice. In South Africa, following the end of apartheid, and in Rwanda, after the genocide there, many in those countries who were gravely harmed have embraced restorative justice practices to heal trauma and prevent further conflict.

Maryknoll lay missioners involved in restorative justice work with people and groups to prevent and intervene in conflict situations through accompaniment and mediation to restore relationships. They teach members of the community, churches, judicial systems, and others in violence prevention about conflict resolution and nonviolent communication and how to apply them at the local level.

Marj will join these missioners in providing spaces for people to come together and dialogue about differences and learn how to solve problems peacefully.

“Medicine is one kind of compassion and care. Another is listening to people and being present to them,” Marj says. There’s an epidemic of not listening, she explains, and that’s why we have a violent world. When someone actually listens to you and really hears you, it changes you, and then you’re able to do it for someone else. But you can’t do it until someone does it for you. 

“Restorative justice has shown to be an effective method of people coming to understand each other and stop hating each other, and then to start healing and moving forward,” she says. They want to be free of their pain, she explains, and reconciliation is the only true way out of that pain.

“I’ve learned so much from East Africans. Their joy in the face of adversity and the importance they place on relationships are profound,” she says. 

Marj’s initial restorative justice project is in Uganda and will be short-term and then she will go to Kenya where her ministry is to be determined and could include restorative justice as well as trauma healing, health education, and working with women’s groups.

Whatever she ends up doing though, her aim is the same, she says: “I want to contribute to making the world a more peaceful place.”

Marj once shared with the Maryknoll community a prayer of the Maasai people of Kenya and Tanzania:

Receive this holy fire.
Make your lives like this fire.
A holy life that is seen.
A life that has no end.
A life that darkness does not overcome.
May this light of God in you grow.
Light a fire that is worthy of your heads.
Light a fire that is worthy of your children.
Light a fire that is worthy of your fathers.
Light a fire that is worthy of your mothers.
Now go in peace.

Jennifer Tomshack is Maryknoll Lay Missioners’ communications manager.