COQUITLAM—A Chinese nun who formerly cared for lepers and performed eye surgery is now teaching children about God.

Sister Maria Peng, SIHM, with a black habit and beaming smile, works at a preschool and daycare run by the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

“I worked with lepers for almost seven years,” she told The B.C. Catholic two weeks before the World Day for Consecrated Life. Sister Peng took vows as a Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary almost 20 years ago.

In China, sisters in her congregation are often found serving in churches, teaching religion, operating nursing homes, and running daycares. Sister Peng sought a degree in health care.

After graduation, she found work in a government hospital for one year, then she served in other communities, including one of lepers.

“She would carry them on her back. She was so brave,” said Sister Veronica Tang, SIHM, who also lives in Coquitlam. “Then the wounds, she washed them.”

Sister Peng also specialized in eye surgeries, and worked in this field until her superior sent her to B.C. in 2007. “I am really enjoying my working because the children are really cute and they love me too,” she said.

Sisters Peng and Tang live in a convent in Coquitlam, just next door to the Immaculate Heart Early Childhood Education Centre and Our Lady of Fatima Church.

Their congregation established the centre in 1994. Inside its bright walls, young children learn everything from math to geography to Mass parts.

Sister Tang was sent from China to Coquitlam to run a daycare in 1983. She boarded the plane with a degree in education from London and a tiny suitcase of books. When she got off the plane she found there was no daycare facility and no convent to live in.

The nun, then 42, was offered a couch in a Catholic seniors’ home. “I leaned on it and boom! One leg broke and I fell down on the floor.” She wanted to fly back to Hong Kong, where she’d taught in a secondary school.

“I just looked at Jesus on the cross in the room, and I said: ‘Jesus, what can I do for You? The Bible said to follow the Good Shepherd. I follow You.'”

Sister Tang, now a nun for more than 40 years, was raised in a Buddhist family. As a young girl she became attracted to the Church when she visited a Catholic school and was dazzled by an image of Our Lady.

She picked up an application to join the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary at age 21, but her parents refused to allow it. She knelt before a statue of St. Joseph in deep prayer, and now calls it a miracle that her Buddhist father agreed to sign the papers.

Now in Coquitlam, she serves seniors, the poor, and young drug addicts by serving them meals, bringing Communion, and teaching catechism and the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults.

She’s well known in the Chinese community and even counselled in Cantonese a young man after he tried to commit suicide by jumping off the roof of St. Paul’s hospital. “Every vocation is different.”

The convent is also home to Sister Lucy Lee, SIHM, and Sister Monica Leung, SIHM, both of whom served at St. Francis Xavier Parish and are now retired.

The order was founded an American priest and missionary, Father James E. Walsh. He landed in China in 1918, and after becoming a bishop, founded the order of nuns in 1936 to help evangelize.

Sister Tang worries about who will carry on the sisters’ work in the archdiocese in future years; there have been no new vocations to her convent since she arrived in 1983. “Pray for us,” she said.