There is life beyond retirement

January 25, 2010

Tags: Solidarity, family

“Some people retire and go off to Benidorm or Marbella. When we retired, we got the chance to move to Congo,” says Ines. She and her husband and Ramon, both doctors, are parents of 10 children. Ines and Ramon don’t consider themselves heroic. The heroes are the people who live there permanently. “It didn’t cost me an effort to move to Kinshasa,” states Ramon simply.

All their lives, they had learned from St Josemaria to work tirelessly, seeing their work as a springboard for passing on the spirit of Christianity. “Work that is done well is always profitable,” says Ines. Ever since her friends and former colleagues heard that her new home would be in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, they have been telling her they’d like to come too. The local media and Nuestro Tiempo, a University of Navarre newspaper, have also shown an interest. “Moving to Africa does have its glamorous side,” Ines explains.

Ines (née Dorronsoro) and Ramon Diaz met in the University of Navarre at the beginning of the 1960s while studying in the Faculty of Medicine in Pamplona. They were married on June 26, 1965. The day before the wedding, Ines sat her final exam. And the day after it, they traveled to Madison, Wisconsin, USA, where Ramon had been offered a three-year grant.

They had both met St Josemaria during their student years, attended Christian formational activities organized by Opus Dei, and both joined it as Supernumeraries.

After their time in the US, they came back to Pamplona, but two years later moved to Tours, France. Three years on, they came back to Pamplona. By this time they had five children.

Ines was head of the Navarre hospital microbiology unit for twenty-five years. Ramon was also head of microbiology, but at the Navarre University hospital, for thirty years. They had come back from the US with the idea that it wasn’t a good idea for a husband and wife to work in the same place.

Their family grew to ten children, and now they have five grandchildren.

Ramon was a WHO expert in brucellosis, also known as Maltese fever, which has now nearly died out thanks in part to his research work.

For Ines, retirement was a liberation: at last she would be able to spend more time on her home and family, and have lunch with her husband. This was her highest “ambition”. But life is full of surprises, and their latest surprise was Africa. They had never set foot on the continent before, although they had traveled a lot and were used to tackling the difficulties involved in combining their jobs with bringing up a large family, in foreign countries, working in a language that was not their mother-tongue.

Monkole hospital is a corporate work of Opus Dei in Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Its latest project is to ask retired doctors and other medical professionals to move there to contribute their professional know-how to the hospital, which is like a breath of fresh air, healthwise, in one of the least developed countries in Africa. Most places in DR Congo have neither electricity nor running water. There is a shortage of medical staff to work in the laboratories. In the Western world people talk about “nuclear medicine”, while in most parts of DR Congo, the most elementary practices of medical hygiene have not yet been introduced.

Ines and Ramon made a two-week trip to Monkole just before Christmas 2009, and are now studying how to set up a much-needed laboratory there. They are doing fund-raising and looking for public funding, and when they have sorted all this out they will move back there.

They are sure that for this new stage of their lives they will be able to rely on St Josemaria’s help. They feel it was significant that they got married on June 26, the date that, years later, the Church fixed as St Josemaria’s feast-day.

Promoted by the not-for-profit organization Congolese Center for Culture Education and Development (CECFOR), Monkole is situated in the municipal community of Mont-Ngafula, a semi-urban district in the southwestern outskirts of Kinshasa, with an estimated population of 220,000 living on virtually no income.