“They Were Never Ours to Lose”

American nuns Ita Ford and Maura Clarke were members of the Maryknoll order, which specialized in international mission work. In 1980 they were working in the Salvadoran mountain town of Chalatenango assisting in a project for the resettlement of refugees fleeing the unfolding violence. Sister Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline nun, and Jean Donovan, a lay volunteer, were conducting similar work for a parish in the coastal town of La Libertad.

Jean Donovan had previously worked at an accounting firm in Cleveland, Ohio, but in 1977 she quit her job and joined the Maryknoll Lay Mission, a Catholic order. Donovan was sent to El Salvador where she worked as an accountant. Not surprisingly, Donovan greatly admired Archbishop Romero and even worked with him. She regularly baked him chocolate chip cookies and dropped them off after Sunday mass. Although increasingly terrified as violence levels escalated in the late 1970s, Donovan continued her work: “Things are so much worse, it's unbelievable,” she reflected to a friend in May 1980. “People are being killed daily. We just found out that three people from our area had been taken, tortured, and hacked to death.” Not long after, two close friends were murdered immediately after walking her home. She considered returning to the United States. “I almost could,” she wrote, “except for the children, the poor, bruised victims of this insanity. Who would care for them? Whose heart could be so staunch as to favor the reasonable thing in a sea of their tears and loneliness? Not mine, dear friend, not mine.”

Dorothy Kazel and Maura Clarke also revealed their fears through their writing but, like Donavan, neither could bring themselves to leave El Salvador.