Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki

Sister Euphrasia (Efu) Nyaki trained as a teacher at Changombe TTC in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania before joining Maryknoll in August, 1990. She was assigned to Brazil in 1993 with a Mission Unit comprised of the different entities of the Maryknoll family of Sisters, Priests and Brothers and Lay Missioners.

Sister Efu, together with Sister Connie Pospisil and a Brazilian woman leader, Maria du Lyrdes Gomes, established the holistic health center AFYA, meaning ‘health’ in Swahili, the language spoken in Tanzania and parts of East Africa. AFYA offers alternative forms of preventative health care and holistic healing to adult and adolescent women and their impoverished communities in northern Brazil.

AFYA has a particularly empowering effect in that those who have participated in the healing process are encouraged to give of their own time to the center as volunteers. In this way, those who have leadership skills often devote themselves to helping others.

In 2011, Sister Efu spent a month in Haiti to help people overcome trauma following a massive earthquake there that killed hundreds of thousands of people.