COLUMN ONE : 5 Seekers of Good Find Evil : They were country girls from Illinois who grew up to be ordinary women of extraordinary faith. In their 60s, they worked as missionaries in Liberia, where even their best intentions could not protect them.

First the sisters heard their five fellow nuns were missing. It was not true. Then they heard the nuns were safe. That was not true. Then they heard they were being held hostage. It was not true. Finally, they heard the sisters were under house arrest. That was not true, either.

The five nuns were in Liberia, and sometimes the truth from Africa comes in roundabout ways. Four young Liberian women heard about part of what happened. Then they saw the rest. They fled in terror. Catholic leaders hid them and alerted missionaries. One priest got a phone call through to his religious order in New Jersey. His superior called Ruma.

At 2:35 a.m. on Oct. 31, 1992, the telephone rang here at the regional headquarters of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ. Worried sleepless, Sister Meg Kopish, one of the seconds-in-command, had been reading, then tossing--and finally had closed her eyes for half an hour. The phone rang again. Meg Kopish picked it up. She heard a weary voice say: “I’ve got some very bad news.”

This time it sounded certain. Overwhelmed, Meg took the news to her boss, Sister Mildred Gross, the provincial, or regional superior. Summoning courage, Meg stood for a moment at Millie’s door. Then she knocked.

Millie sat up in bed.

“All five sisters,” Meg said, “have been killed.”

Sister Barbara Ann Muttra. Sister Shirley Kolmer. Sister Joel Kolmer. Sister Agnes Mueller. Sister Kathleen McGuire. Only two recent incidents rival this as a massacre of nuns or priests. Both were in El Salvador during the 1980s, when three nuns were killed and then six priests were put to death. At that time, finding those responsible became a cause. This time, however, the slaughter happened two weeks before President Clinton was elected. The election swept attention away from Liberia and a civil war in which the nuns and 150,000 others have died--almost as many as in Bosnia.

This is the story of these five nuns: who they were, what they did and how they were killed. All five were Americans. The story raises questions about what the United States can or will do to protect its people abroad, even to investigate the harm that befalls them. In the year since the killings, the State Department has done little or no investigating. It says it is “shocked and appalled” by the slayings and holds a group of Liberian rebels responsible. But knowledgeable officials say that the killers are not likely to be brought to justice unless the rebels themselves cooperate.

The story also raises questions about the wisdom of missionaries who place themselves so directly in harm’s way, despite what many concede to be a worthy cause. Even the Precious Blood Sisters, as they are occasionally known, acknowledge that some people might think of those who take such risks as simple fools. But this, they say, is their calling: to be where they are needed most as nurses, teachers and parish ministers, and to go where others might not want to be. They are called, they say, to be witnesses to the love their God offers to anyone, everywhere, no matter what.

*

All five were country girls. But they were no longer youngsters. Three were in their 60s; one was nearly 70. All were well educated. Two had master’s degrees; two had doctorates; two were registered nurses. Most were experienced missionaries. One had been abroad for five years, two for 10 years and one for 24 years. All were strong advocates of human rights, especially the rights of women. Not one was sanctimonious. “When we’d go and visit them,” Sister Meg Kopish says, “they’d always tell us to bring three things: U.S. currency, good chocolate and good liquor.”

SISTER BARBARA ANN MUTTRA / She was a nurse who loved children. Nothing was too good for them.

Barbara Ann Muttra was the oldest. She was born in Springfield, Ill., one of seven children. She attended a girls’ academy run by Ursuline nuns. She liked to hang out with her friends and get together with boys from Cathedral High, not far away. She dated. She got elected class secretary. She liked bowling and putting on shorts and tying a white bow into her dark brown hair and heading out to Lake Springfield for a tan. But most of all, says her sister, Mary Sabo, she liked kids.

Between her junior and senior years in high school, she helped out at a summer camp, called Star of the Sea. Nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ brought youngsters from an orphanage they ran in Alton. The nuns impressed her. Barbara intended to be a nurse. After she graduated, she went to the Adorers’ convent at Ruma, and the nuns sent her to nurse’s training. Pictures show her smiling. When she came home for visits, the family celebrated with pineapple upside-down cake.

As a young nun, too, nothing pleased her more than children. She took charge of the orphanage at Alton, and her children had to have nothing but the best. She sat with them on their tiny chairs and fed them and ate with them. She moved her bed next to their dormitory; if any of them woke at night, she got up with them. She set up what she called her assembly line. She taught the big ones how to bathe the little ones and how to dry them and dress them and bring them downstairs.

From the orphanage, she went to a number of hospitals. At St. Vincent’s in Taylorville, she became the chief of pharmacy, then the head surgical nurse for 10 years. In pediatrics, she was famous for her jack-o’-lanterns on Halloween. But it was in obstetrics that she became a minor legend. At St. Clement’s in Red Bud, she had charge of the nursery. As usual, nothing was too good for the babies. When summer came and there was no air conditioning, she brought in huge tubs of ice. She lined up fans behind the ice, turned them on and blew every fuse in the place. When winter came and there was not enough heat, she brought in an array of electric heaters. She plugged them in, turned them on and blew every fuse again.

It did not make her popular with the hospital administration. But no matter, says Sister Clare Boehmer, who is writing a book about Barbara Ann and the four others. “This woman would not take no for an answer. . . . The babies were going to be warm in the winter and cool in the summer.”

In 1968, she volunteered to go to Vietnam as a children’s nurse for Catholic Relief Services. “Nothing surprised us,” Mary Sabo says. “If she made up her mind that she wanted to do something, she did it.” In Vietnam, she was assigned to the Go Vap Orphanage near Saigon. She borrowed pickup trucks and drivers from the Air Force and gathered up Amerasian children nobody wanted. Then she begged the Army for extra food to feed them. She nursed at Kontum, Bin Ba and Qui Nhon. At Quang In, the mayor awarded her a medal.

After three years, she came back, bringing a 2-year-old and a 1-year-old to be adopted by families in America.

Shortly afterward, she volunteered to go to Liberia.

Did her family try to stop her?

“Stop her?” asks her sister Mary, with a smile. “No. You couldn’t stop her.”

SISTER SHIRLEY KOLMER / She had a doctorate in mathematics and was a Fulbright scholar.

Shirley Kolmer was a farm girl. She and her five brothers and sisters grew up on the rolling brown-earth prairie along State Route 3, just outside Waterloo, Ill., population 5,072. The Kolmer family worked hard, including Shirley and her sister Elizabeth. But like most youngsters, they preferred to play. To avoid doing the dishes, Elizabeth says, the two of them would climb into a chicken roost or sit in the outhouse until their legs fell asleep.

Shirley liked to tease. Sometimes she and Elizabeth would hide from an older brother and taunt him as he worked: “Leee Rooyy! Leeeee Roooyyy!” Shirley went to the parish school. A year later, so did Elizabeth. The school had five rooms for eight grades. “I was in the same room with her when she was in the seventh grade,” Elizabeth says. “And one of the things I was assured of: I always knew that if there was some trouble in the classroom, she was in it.”

The teachers were nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ. They always said that if any of the Kolmer girls became a nun, it would not be Elizabeth or Shirley. Little did they know that one summer day, after Shirley had finished the eighth grade and Elizabeth the seventh, the two were out picking cherries and Elizabeth said: “You know, I think what I want to do next year is go to the provincial house (at Ruma).”

Shirley replied: “I’m going to do that this fall.”

The nuns were stunned. Both girls went to high school at the convent and took their vows. Today Elizabeth is Sister Elizabeth Kolmer, director of American studies at St. Louis University. Shirley taught for 12 years at small-town elementary and high schools in Illinois. She earned a master’s degree in mathematics from St. Louis University, then went to Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and earned a doctorate in numbers theory. She went back to St. Louis University and taught for 10 years, including such multidisciplinary courses as “Mathematics and Art.”

She had a remarkable mind. “Quick, sharp, clear,” says Sister Clare Boehmer, the nuns’ biographer. But sometimes Shirley’s mind moved so fast, it could be intimidating. At the same time, she could be strong-willed. Together, her intellect and her will could be formidable, Sister Clare says. “She could have a way of steam-rolling people.”

By all accounts, Shirley knew the power of her personality. “She told me one time, ‘I have to really be careful,’ ” says Sister Antoinette Cusimano, who served in Liberia with her. When Shirley was careful, she was kind. But when she was not careful, she could be very difficult. “Some people,” Sister Toni says, “really had some run-ins with her.”

Part of Shirley, however, was not complicated at all. One of her older sisters, Mary Lou Hankammer, says she could be as “common and simple as an old shoe.” She rarely made her bed. She forgot to renew her driver’s license. She valued ordinary wisdom. Sometimes she and her brother Joe would talk into the night, sipping whiskey and solving the world’s problems. She drank Colonel Lee. It was 100-proof.

Even with her doctorate in math, she sometimes had trouble adding and subtracting like anyone else. Elizabeth tells about meeting a woman one day who wanted to enroll one of her children in St. Louis University. She had five of her own and had just married a man with 11. “I went home, and I said to Shirley, ‘You know what? This lady married this guy. He has 11 kids, and she has five.’

“ ‘Gosh,’ Shirley says, ’11 and five, that’s 17 kids!’

“I couldn’t believe it. I said, ‘Shirley! Eleven and five. That’s 16.’ ”

Her common touch gave her empathy with the less privileged. She marched at Selma. She picketed the White House for civil rights. She worked hard for women, particularly for women in the church.

So nobody was surprised when she decided to go to Liberia, where the dispossessed were legion. But her family worried. “Shirley,” Mary Lou Hankammer says, “had a hard time telling Mom.

“She knew that Mom wouldn’t like it.”

SISTER JOEL KOLMER / She was a teacher and a happy nun with an easy sense of humor.

Joel Kolmer was Shirley’s cousin. She, too, was a farm girl. When she was just 7 months old, her father died, and she, her mother and her older brothers moved in with Shirley’s family.

They stayed until Joel was 4, when her mother remarried. Along with Shirley, Joel was taught in elementary school by nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ. And, like Shirley, Joel decided to go to high school at Ruma and become a nun.

As a junior, however, she developed sciatica, a nerve condition that affected her ability to walk. So she came home. She finished high school in nearby Waterloo and worked as a file clerk at a St. Louis insurance company. She dated. Her brother Ken remembers one young man so smitten he drove all the way out from St. Louis to court her.

The day after she turned 21, she said, “I’m going back.”

At Ruma, she took her vows. She was a remarkably happy nun, and she worked hard at spreading that happiness. She had a sunrise smile and an easy laugh, and her eyes laughed with her. She taught elementary and junior high school at Ft. Dodge, Iowa, and at several small towns in Illinois. Everywhere she seemed to achieve something rare: She won the respect of her students but never let people take her too seriously.

She liked to sneak up behind Sister Antoinette Cusimano and nudge the back of her legs to buckle her knees. She watched TV with so much animation that she was more fun to watch than television itself. “She got so into these television shows that it was unbelievable,” says Victor Weltig, one of her half-brothers. “ ‘Oh, don’t open that door! Ach, don’t do that now! Oh! Oh, no! Get back!’ And it was always, ‘Oh, you guys! Oh, now look at that!’ ” She liked Ping-Pong. She was a wicked card player, says cousin Mary Lou Hankammer. She made up her own rules. The rules tended to be, says her brother Ken, “whichever way she won.”

She got into trouble at Ft. Dodge for jumping off a convent porch into a snowdrift in full sisterly regalia. She was the one who laughed loudest when Sister Alvina Schott, her superior at the time, sledded down a hill in a large pan and snagged the bottom of her garb, and it peeled off. “I was out there with next to nothing on,” Sister Alvina says. “Oh, Joel just about cried.”

She liked a beer. She played the guitar: hymns, but also country western. Sometimes she jammed with three other nuns who had a band. They called themselves the Bad Habit.

She was best known for her driving skills. At Ft. Dodge, she backed a pastor’s car into a ditch. Once she came so close to being hit by a train that a railroad crossing gate bounced off the top of her car. Another time, she came upon a school bus that was signaling cars to stop while it unloaded children. She passed it anyway. The bus driver got her license number. “The police came to the house,” says Sister Mildred Gross, the provincial superior. “They took her license away--for six months, I think.”

Not that she was intentionally bad. Indeed, her driving habits seemed to be part of an unyielding innocence. She had difficulty understanding that something bad could happen. “Joel just did not know evil,” Sister Clare Boehmer says. “I don’t think she could comprehend it. She’s one of the few people that I have ever met in my life that I would really apply the word ‘good’ to without any reservations.”

It showed in her compassion. She felt the pain of others deeply and personally. So it was that when she, too, volunteered to go to Liberia, nobody was surprised.

Her family, like Shirley’s, worried. But they knew there was no stopping her.

SISTER AGNES MUELLER / She did advanced study in theology. She, too, was a teacher and a nurse.

Agnes Mueller was born in the prairie town of Bartelso, Ill., population 389. She was the fifth of nine children, and by one account her father’s favorite. Paul Mueller, an older brother, says she and her high school friends liked to hang out at a bowling alley across from home. “She was the type to run around quite a bit, not to the point where you’d think she would get into trouble,” he says, “but at the same time you wouldn’t think she was going to join a religious order.”

Her older sister, Mary Ann, however, had become an Adorer of the Blood of Christ. The prospect interested Agnes, especially the possibility of becoming a missionary. She joined the convent at Ruma and went to St. Louis University. Like Barbara Ann Muttra, she became a nurse. She worked and taught at hospitals in Taylorville and Red Bud, where she was gentle, quiet-spoken and well-liked. “She was a very private person,” Sister Clare Boehmer says. “I lived with her a full year, and I don’t think I ever heard her complain.” She was more reflective than quick. “Agnes, I think, asked a lot of questions of life,” Sister Clare says. “Life didn’t just happen to her. She really questioned it.”

After 18 years of nursing, she went to Dubuque, Iowa, to attend the Aquinas Institute. She became the first woman there to earn a master’s degree in theology. She quit nursing to teach. In time, she came to an important conclusion. The Catholic Church, she decided, had been locking itself into a patriarchal emphasis on the Scriptures that tended to miss an important point. God, she said, is not just father but also mother.

She was not forward about it. “She was never one to push her ideas onto anyone,” Sister Clare says. “She respected others’ views. But she wanted them to think about hers.” Indeed, a tape recording of a class she taught for parish catechists in Herrin, Ill., opens with Agnes addressing a man in the group. “I may have to ask pardon of you,” she said, “before I even begin.” But then she went on unflinchingly. “To be able to realize that God speaks to all people, and that God’s presence can come to us through all people, we (should not) limit God. . . .

“We (must) realize that it might be the face of God coming to us in a Hispanic, or a black person, or a Lutheran, or someone from Arabia or the Far East,” she said. Sometimes, she added, the face of God might even be reflected in a woman. “If God is all in all,” she asked, “how can he be only he?”

At the same time, her quiet way of questioning and reflecting brought her to another conclusion: It is as necessary for women as it is for men to go out into God’s world and make it a better place.

“That’s where God is,” she said. “Right there, in that struggle, in that hassle.”

After a sabbatical to attend the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif., she took herself at her own word. She volunteered for Liberia.

SISTER KATHLEEN McGUIRE / A teacher and an administrator, she had a doctorate in education.

Kathleen McGuire was born in Ponds Settlement, Ill., a place so small it was hardly a town. Her father had a farm there, and she grew up much like the Kolmers up at Waterloo.

She attended one-room schools at Daly and Keane. Every summer, nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ came to a church at Ponds Settlement, called St. Patrick’s, to teach religion. By the fourth grade, they had impressed her so much she wanted to become a nun.

She graduated from the eighth grade as valedictorian and left for high school at the Ruma convent. “She would have gone sooner,” says Pauline McGuire, her mother, “if we would have let her.” After high school, she took her vows. She earned a degree in English from St. Louis University, with minors in Latin and philosophy. She embarked on teaching and administrative assignments at a succession of elementary and high schools in Illinois and Iowa. In between, she earned a master’s degree in English literature from St. Louis University and a doctorate in education from the University of Massachusetts.

Through it all, she hewed to something her mother had taught her. Pauline McGuire always said that what one did was just as important as whether one prayed. “Her God,” Kathleen wrote years later, “was as much interested in what she did outside of ‘prayer time’ as in her prayer--and, in fact, was not at all interested in her prayer if she did not do right at other times.”

Kathleen gave witness to that principle in two notable ways. She opposed the Vietnam War. When her youngest brother, Fred, went to Southeast Asia to fly 150 missions as an Air Force helicopter pilot, Kathleen demonstrated against the war. It became a family joke. “I used to tell her,” says her older brother, Bob, “I’d say, ‘I’ve got a load of corn I can sell to get you out of jail.’ She’d laugh.” But between Kathleen and Fred it was not a laughing matter. Some of their debates took place around the family table. “It would get pretty hairy,” Bob says. Another younger brother, Chuck, says, “(We) had to call time out.”

The second way came at the height of the Sanctuary Movement for illegal immigrants from Guatemala and El Salvador. Some Americans, many of them church workers, considered these immigrants refugees from political and military terror and gave them shelter. It meant breaking the law and doing it publicly, in hopes that restrictions on immigration might be eased. Sanctuary workers had been prosecuted in Arizona. But this gave Kathleen no pause. She put it to her fellow sisters: Would they be willing to declare the Ruma convent a sanctuary for such immigrants? Sister Kate Reid, one of Kathleen’s best friends, says lawyers advised: “Don’t touch it.” But Kathleen persuaded the provincial leadership to let the community of nuns decide. She campaigned hard for support. When the sisters voted, sanctuary won.

Big brother Bob needled her. “Where are you hiding them?” Little brother Chuck grinned. “The sheriff is looking for you.”

But Kathleen handled it with aplomb. Nobody raided the convent, and the sisters helped settle several Central Americans in the United States.

It gave her an abiding appreciation for the rejected and the downtrodden. Kathleen talked of it frequently, most memorably at a party where her friends remember her quietly sipping a small glass of Tanqueray gin and describing the courage of the poor and the helpless, and how these people had become an important part of her life.

It was a small step, her friends say, from there to Liberia.

*

It was six degrees north of the Equator, a land of boa constrictors and 200 inches of rain each year and dry, dusty winds called the harmattans. It had malaria and hepatitis and cholera and yellow fever. Its people belonged to 16 tribes ruled by the descendants of freed American slaves, who had begun arriving in 1821. They were called Americo-Liberians. They drafted a declaration of independence and gave Liberia a constitution much like America’s. They named their capital Monrovia in honor of U.S. President James Monroe. They were a small minority, but they governed with a privileged and forceful hand. They displaced entire tribal communities to provide land for American companies and to create a labor force. They were accused of selling tribal Liberians into servitude in other countries. They grew wealthy and were said to be corrupt.

In time, their oppression kindled violence. Samuel K. Doe, an army sergeant and member of the Krahn tribe, finally ended the Americo-Liberian reign in 1980 by having President William Tolbert disemboweled with bayonets. Doe ordered that 13 members of Tolbert’s Cabinet be strapped to posts and shot to death. He had the killings televised. Doe proclaimed himself president. He favored his own tribe over others, particularly the Gios and Manos. He ignored civil rights, and he enriched himself. He had help from the United States, which at one point gave Liberia more money per capita than any other nation in sub-Saharan Africa. One of Doe’s generals, from a county populated by Gios and Manos, tried to overthrow him. Doe had him shot and his body mutilated. He had the body placed in an open car and put on tour throughout Monrovia. Finally, he had the body hacked apart.

*

In 1971, the Adorers of the Blood of Christ opened a mission in Grand Cess, a village of the Kru tribe about 200 miles south of Monrovia. That November, Barbara Ann Muttra became the first of the five to arrive. She brought medicine and equipment to run a clinic.

She took over a whitewashed concrete building. It had wood paneling inside and old ceiling fans, which made it look like something out of “Casablanca.” According to a diary, called the annals, which the order keeps at each of its missions, more than 100 people lined up at the clinic every day for help. Barbara Ann went to see those who could not come. In a simple cotton dress, often tie-dyed, and wearing tennis shoes, usually blue, she rode a motorbike into the countryside and served as a nurse, physician, dentist and counselor for anyone and everyone.

Her feats were well-known. A Kru tribesman hunting leopards was attacked by his prey. She sewed him up and nursed him back to health. Another was gored by a bull. He was so badly hurt nobody would fly him to Cape Palmas, where there was a hospital, for fear he would die on the way and his family might hold the pilot responsible. So Barbara Ann went to work. A month later, he walked out of her clinic a well man.

Predictably, however, her chief concern was children. She supported healthful tribal customs but battled constantly against others: shaking pepper into the eyes of infants, for instance, or rubbing cow dung on their navels. She was tough with anybody who mistreated a child, even inadvertently. Father Brandon Darcy, a priest with the Society of African Missions, whose order had persuaded the Adorers of the Blood of Christ to come to Liberia, calls her “the toughest version of compassion you’ve ever seen.”

One day, Father Darcy got curious. He took down the death book at the Grand Cess mission and started counting. In the years since Barbara Ann had arrived, infant deaths had plunged from two a week to two a year.

“You know what? I have to take my hat off to you,” he told her. “Your presence here has made one hell of a difference.”

She trained others to replace her and went from Grand Cess to the town of Kle, about 25 miles north of Monrovia. Sister Toni Cusimano went with her. She had spent a year in Kenya learning ways to teach Scripture while respecting indigenous cultures. Barbara Ann established another clinic. She trained a half dozen health care workers to staff it and one Liberian woman to be the director. The people of Kle and the surrounding villages were so grateful they gowned both nuns in African garb during an eloquent ceremony. They began calling each of them “Ol’ Ma”--a term of respect reserved for the kind and the wise.

After nearly 20 years in Liberia, however, Barbara Ann’s own health began to falter. On Feb. 2, 1990, she flew home to Illinois because of ovarian cancer. Doctors operated. Malaria made chemotherapy impossible. Slowly, however, she mended and asked to be allowed to return.

*

In 1977, Shirley Kolmer won a Fulbright fellowship to teach mathematics at the University of Liberia. She was an impressive figure on campus. She was tall. Her hair was turning silver. She wore tinted glasses and print dresses in brown, red, white and orange. “A breath of fresh air,” says Sam McClain, who was in one of her classes. “She was a good teacher, friendly, kind, helpful.”

The university asked her to renew her fellowship for a second year, and Fulbright officials agreed. But her order selected her to be superior of the Ruma province. She returned to the convent in Illinois. As soon as her term of office ended, however, she left again for Monrovia. This time the University of Liberia hired her directly, without any fellowship. She also took over as principal of St. Patrick’s, a high school for boys, reputed to be the best in the country. In her spare time, she taught Liberian women to read and write.

By now the order had opened a convent in Gardnersville, a suburb east of Monrovia. By force of her personality and by request from Ruma, Shirley became the informal leader at the convent and of all eight Adorers of the Blood of Christ who were working in Liberia.

*

Joel Kolmer arrived in 1982. She was assigned to teach in Grand Cess. By now, nuns from the Ruma province were helping to educate more than 1,500 young Liberians every year.

Joel brought along her laughter and her pranks. In time, she was reassigned to Gardnersville, where she skewed the rules in card games. She cooked dinners of palm butter, chicken and jaloff rice and served guests Club Beer, her favorite. Occasionally she brought out her guitar and sang. In time, the order decided to open an aspirancy at the Gardnersville convent, to offer training and a place to live for young Liberians who wanted to become nuns. Joel was placed in charge.

She was a remarkable director of aspirants. The convent was divided into two sections, one for the resident nuns and the other for Joel and the aspirants. They lived with her and the community of sisters during high school and then went back home to decide whether they wanted to take the next steps: become affiliates, complete their schooling, go to a novitiate, take temporary vows and finally take the permanent vows of sisterhood. At first, three aspirants came to the convent, then five. Joel overcame cultural and intertribal differences and taught the young women everything from religion to art to music to stitchery.

*

In 1987, Agnes Mueller came. Like Joel, she taught. She was assigned to Kle and found conditions difficult. She was in her late 50s and getting gray. But she persevered, and finally she wrote home to say: “I’m becoming enculturated.” Typically, her chief concern was women.

She organized a literacy class for the women of Kle. Each evening, she and Toni Cusimano visited the surrounding villages for prayer services. When Barbara Ann left, they doubled as health care workers. But Agnes had just recovered from cataract surgery before leaving the United States, and Toni worried about her. “These were terribly bumpy roads,” Toni says. “She didn’t want to give it up.” Agnes returned from every trip with a headache. “I felt terrible,” Toni says, “but she wanted to do it.”

At the Gardnersville convent, Shirley Kolmer worried about Agnes too. “We talked at our place,” says Sister Alvina Schott, who was there at the time. “And I said, ‘Well, there’s room here for her to work.’ ” So Shirley invited Agnes to move into the Gardnersville convent. She accepted, and within weeks she began a literacy class for women in Gardnersville. She taught religion at St. Anthony’s parish, and she helped Alvina run the parish school.

In the spring of 1990, however, her sight began to fail. She flew to Illinois for more surgery. Like Barbara Ann, she immediately requested permission to return.

*

On Christmas Eve, the annals at the Gardnersville convent had recorded an event of unforeseeable portent. An expatriate named Charles Taylor had invaded Liberia from Ivory Coast. Taylor was 42. He was born near Monrovia and had gone to Bentley College in Waltham, Mass. After college, he had returned to Liberia to take a job in the corrupt Doe regime. Taylor was accused of taking nearly $900,000 for himself. He fled to the United States. At Doe’s request, he was arrested near Boston . He cut his way out of jail with a hacksaw blade, slipped down a rope made of bedsheets and fled. Later he was reported to be in Libya as a guest of Moammar Kadafi. Now, with apparent backing from Libya, Burkina Faso and Ivory Coast, he had entered Liberia with 100 troops. He recruited disaffected Gios and Manos and called his group the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL) . He proclaimed himself president.

*

Not long after Barbara Ann and Agnes left, Charles Taylor’s rebellion reached Kle. He enlisted boys, some of them barely teen-agers. Many were drugged or drunk. All had assault rifles. “The situation in the country is getting worse,” say the Kle convent annals. “It is difficult and dangerous.”

In Monrovia, Shirley closed St. Patrick’s high school. “(It) is too vulnerable being located so close to the capitol,” say the annals at the convent in suburban Gardnersville. “The rebel forces could attack Monrovia at any time.” The U.S. embassy arranged planes to evacuate Americans. Sister Alvina Schott, due for a vacation, took one of the flights.

“Don’t you think,” Toni Cusimano asked, “that we ought to think about leaving too?”

Shirley said no. Closing a school for the sake of the students was one thing, but letting Taylor scare her and her sisters out of Liberia was another. “We’re staying,” she said.

On June 11, however, Shirley sent all of the aspirants home to their families. St. Anthony’s parish had a clinic, and she and Joel kept it open should it become necessary to treat the wounded. “Killings kept being reported every day,” the Gardnersville annals say, “and gunshots are heard at night.” In July, Taylor finally laid siege to Monrovia. Electricity and water were cut off. Gasoline ran out first, then meat and fish.

In Kle, the rebels threatened to kill Toni Cusimano. They took her car and her food. Then they showed up at the convent in Gardnersville. They searched it and asked Shirley and Joel if they were hiding government troops. “Gunfire, machine guns and explosives were going on all this time,” the annals say. Bullets whistled through the convent windows and hit the walls and ceilings. “We stayed low near the floor . . . ,” says one entry in the annals, in Joel’s handwriting. “We could not speak, so we were whispering.”

Shirley and Joel and two Liberians who had sought refuge in the convent were the only people still in the neighborhood. Word spread throughout Monrovia that some of Doe’s soldiers had massacred 600 Gios and Manos at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church downtown, including women and children.

Finally, Shirley began to waver. At 7:30 p.m., on July 31, 1990, she reached Toni Cusimano by shortwave radio in Kle. She suggested to Toni that she leave for Sierra Leone and go on to the United States. Six days later, Toni did.

At 7 a.m., on Aug. 1, Shirley reached fellow sisters who were still in Grand Cess and told them to consider leaving, first to Ivory Coast and then back home to Ruma. Seventeen days later, they did.

On the afternoon of Aug. 1, Shirley and Joel packed a few belongings and some food. With one of the aspirants, who had decided she would flee too, they walked out of the convent.

“We felt we had to leave,” Joel wrote in the annals, “to save our lives.”

The three women and the two Liberians who had been hiding in the convent walked up a road toward Barnersville, a smaller suburb farther from town. “We came across dead bodies,” the annals say. “We had to identify ourselves and have our bags checked at many of the checkpoints where rebels were posted. . . .

“We walked for about 2 1/2 hours, and a commando for the rebels stopped us and gave us a ride.” The commando ran out of gas. They got another ride. Finally they were accused of being Doe supporters and CIA agents. It took Shirley and Joel more than two hours, but they talked themselves and those with them out of trouble.

At 6 p.m. on Aug. 6, they reached the Ivory Coast border and crossed to safety.

There, by chance, Shirley encountered Sam McClain, the young man who had been in one of her classes at the University of Liberia. She told him something that he found hard to believe.

She was determined, he says. “She was going to return to Liberia.”

Monday: The slayings.

Liberia Fact Sheet

Background on Africa’s oldest independent black nation:

Capital: Monrovia

Economy: Civil war has destroyed much of the economy, especially around Monrovia. About three-quarters of the labor force is in agriculture. Chief exports are, iron ore 61%, rubber 20%, timber 11%

History: Established in 1822 as haven for freed slaves. Small “Americo-Liberian” elite (3% to 5% of population) can be traced to those settlers. Most other inhabitants are divided among 16 principal tribes, which adhere to traditional customs and indigenous religions. In general, Americo-Liberians have been far better off than indigenous Africans.

The civil war: In 1980, a small group of Liberia’s indigenous tribes revolted against Americo-Liberian leaders, citing discontent over living conditions and a bad economy. Coup leader Samuel K. Doe took over and ruled Liberia until he was assassinated in September, 1990, by rebel forces.

Current status: Shaky cease-fire. An interim government is running country until February election. Rival rebel factions led by Charles Taylor and Prince Johnson are seeking control while observing the cease-fire.

Sources: CIA’s World Factbook, Political Handbook of the World, Worldbook Encyclopedia