Sister Dora Zapf always was 'a pretty wild one'

By Joanne Flemming
Compass Correspondent

When 18-year-old Dora Zapf of Kirschschoenbach, Germany, told her father that she had a vocation to the Sisters of the Divine Savior, he said, "I give her six weeks and she'll be back."

According to Sr. Dora, Salvatorian Mission Warehouse, New Holstein, he made that statement in the early 1950s. This year, she is celebrating her 50th jubilee as a Salvatorian Sister.

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When asked why her father had said that, she replied: "I was a pretty wild one. I wasn't just sitting around, so that is why he didn't believe I had a vocation. It's not always the sitting-around ones who have vocations. God likes a cheerful giver."

Sr. Dora was the oldest of three children. Her father, she explained, was a Lutheran.

"He was the first one to visit me" after she joined the convent. "He had to sign the papers that let me go in" since she wasn't 21.

She says the "why" of her call is hard to explain exactly. "You are drawn by something, which is eternal. You feel it."

She also attributed it to talks given at her parish by Benedictine and Salvatorian missionaries.

Before she entered the convent at Passau in 1953 in southern Bavaria on the German-Austria border, she had completed a three-year program in dressmaking.

After her first profession of vows in 1956, she was sent to England. There, she had to redo her dressmaking examinations before going to mission work in Tanzania, East Africa, a British protectorate. England did not recognize her German dressmaking certificate. She also had to learn English.

Sr. Dora went to Tanzania in 1960 to serve both in the capital and the southern part of the country. She ran the school in Dar es Salaam with the help of 12 to 14 sisters, many from the United States and taught sewing classes.

"We were the first African school teaching English," she said. Parents, wanting their children educated, brought them in from the bush where there were no schools. "They wanted them to be educated."

The school had 200 boarders, 100 each of boys and girls, all in grades one through eight. Her students included the Tanzanian president's children.

Conditions were rough. There was no drinking water, Sr. Dora said. "We had a hard time finding the right food for 200 children. The African people are very patient. They are taught the principles and basics that God takes care of them in hard times and that it's going to get better."

When she first went to Tanzania, she wore the original habit that Salvatorian sisters wore in the United States and Europe. However, it proved too hot for the climate in Tanzania, so Rome gave the sisters permission to wear a modified habit, similar to that now worn by Manitowoc's Franciscan Sisters of Christian Charity: black skirt and short veil with white blouses and black vests.

After she began wearing the new garb, one of her students looked hard at her hair which he could now see. He said, "Sister, you forgot to put something on."

When Sr. Dora explained that change, he ran through the dormitory explaining that it was okay, that the sisters had permission to show their hair.

Sr. Dora taught the girls to sew by hand, since they had no sewing machines. The sewing classes she gave were part of an after school program.

In 1973, Sr. Dora volunteered to come to the United States to serve at the Salvatorian Mission Warehouse in New Holstein.

"I had been on the receiving end (of mission supplies)," she said. "I knew what it meant to get stuff donated."

She trained a Tanzanian to take over her post. "I put 110% of my talent, work and energy into Tanzania. When I left, I didn't have to regret anything."

"I like Tanzania," she added. "By helping here (at the Mission Warehouse), I help more people over there."

(The Mission Warehouse, founded in 1963 by Br. Regis Fust, SDS, ships thousands of tons of non-perishable food, medicine and clothing to missions around the globe each year - all to sites manned by missionary communities whom Br. Regis is in direct contact with.)

In her 30-plus years at New Holstein, Sr. Dora has grown with it. She has coordinated the more than 300 volunteers who help out weekly in the packing of supplies and loading them into semi-trailers.

She has made four or five trips back to Tanzania, as well as to other countries to see that the items sent are being used properly. Some conditions have improved in Tanzania, she said, but "the basics are still needed. The poor will always be poor."

Sr. Dora is proud of her vocation. "I would die for my vocation as a Salvatorian. It's a great congregation - outgoing, serving the people according to their needs."

Her 50 years have brought her closer to the Lord, she concluded, but she hasn't outgrown some of her wild side. It comes out "now and then. It's my nature," she said with a laugh.

Sr. Dora's hobbies include sewing and raising flowers. She is a member of St. Raphael Parish, Oshkosh.