Sister Joan Sauvigne
Current ministry location-Maryknoll, NY
Joan Sauvigne was born July 18, 1926 to Edith M. (Carlson) Sauvigne and Emil Sauvigne in Miller Field, Staten Island, NY. She had 2 brothers: Arthur and Gerald. Joan graduated from Mineola High School, Mineola, NY in 1945. In 1948 she earned a Diploma in Nursing from Long Island College Hospital, Brooklyn, NY.
Joan Sauvigne entered the Maryknoll Sisters October 14, 1949 at their novitiate in Valley Park, MO. She professed First Vows May 8, 1952 at Valley Park and Final Vows May 8, 1955 in Korea. Her first assignment was giving Congregational Service in the Sisters Motherhouse Infirmary from 1952 to 1953.
In 1953, Sister Joan received her first overseas mission assignment to Korea. She worked as a nurse at the Maryknoll Clinic and Hospital in Pusan and in an outpatient clinic in Chung Pyung. Then she did both teaching and nursing at Blessed Andrew Kim Hospital on Pengyong Island. She ministered to leprosy patients at the National Leprosy Hospital on Sorokdo Island.
Sister Joan had served in Korea for more than thirty years when she returned to Maryknoll, NY, where she worked as a nurse for seven years at the Maryknoll Sisters Nursing Home – to the delight of her infirmed Sisters.
In 1993, she was assigned to the Sudan, a country where the Maryknoll Sisters were driven numerous times from their mission because of an ongoing war. Sister Joan worked as a nurse in Chuckudum village until 1999, when all the buildings in the mission compound were destroyed and the Maryknoll Sisters left amidst gunfire and mortar shells. The Sisters then moved to Nanyangachor, living among Toposa tribal people in an area with very little influence from the outside world.
Sister Joan worked in both a rustic clinic and in a new health center. Her work included tending to those with gunshot wounds, cerebral malaria, infectious diseases and, happily, the births of babies. The nearest hospital was fifteen hours away by road in dry weather.
Sister Joan’s amiable sense of humor came out as she told her famous story about a surprise encounter with a snake in Nanyangachor. One evening when her companion was away on an overnight medical trip, she went outside to catch a little rainwater in a pail. Sister Joan was sitting with a cat listening to the radio when suddenly she noticed that the pail moved. So she took her flashlight and focused it in the area of the pail. That is when she saw a cobra standing erect about nine feet in the air. Needless to say, Sister Joan was in the house in a flash. Within two days, some boys found the snake, killed it and buried it and Sister Joan has lived to tell the tale.
In November 2008, Sister Joan returned to the Maryknoll Sisters Center in NY. She worked in Pastoral Care in the Maryknoll Residential Care Unit.
As a Maryknoll Sister, armed with an R.N. degree from the Long Island College Hospital of Nursing in New York, Sister Joan Sauvigne has ministered as a nurse under many conditions, for thirty-one years in Korea and fourteen years in the Sudan.
“Someday, the harvest of the seeds of hope and peace we have sown will appear” –Maryknoll Sister Joan Sauvigne of her mission service in the Sudan