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For Sr. Mary Killeen, who will be clocking 50 years as a Catholic missionary in Kenya in January 2026, individualism and the desire for “high life” is the number one killer of vocations to Institutes of Consecrated Life and Societies of Apostolic Life (ICLSAL).
When Sr. Mary Killeen, then a young member of the Religious Sisters of Mercy (RSM) from Dublin, Ireland, and Fr. Manuel Gordejuala from Spain started Mukuru Informal Primary School on the fringes of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, they thought that they were addressing a short-term need. They came together to educate the hundreds of children, who wandered aimlessly in the expansive Mukuru slums that had no school.