Historiographical insights and research perspectives
Speech by
Ilaria MACCONI HECKNER, FSCIRE International Fellow
Institutional greetings
Mario TACCOLINI, Poliambulanza Foundation
Scientific organization and introduction
Riccardo SEMERARO and Giovanni GREGORINI, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore
From the end of the fifties onwards, the missionaries concentrated their efforts on the creation of institutes and courses for the higher vocational training of girls. (…) The specialist training offer was completed by the boarding schools for nurses that the nuns usually established within the
of the hospitals they founded. The Consolata Missionaries, for example, began nursing courses in 1946 at the hospital of the mission of Nyeri-Mathari, and then opened a certified school for nurses and midwives in 1949, then the only one existing in the whole of Kenya. In 1960 they founded the Nkubu Community Nurse Training School in Meru, in 1966 the nursing school in Kieni (in the diocese of Embu) and in 1972 a similar one at the hospital in Wamba (in the diocese of the desert of Maralal). (I.Macconi Heckner, Missionary Sisters and Educational Projects in Kenya in the Twentieth Century, in The Faces of Poverty, Vita e pensiero 2022, pp.27-29).
