Rome –
Sister Angel Bipendu, religious and medical, a woman of science but also of faith, visits patients with the new coronavirus in the Bergamo region, one of the most affected in Italy by the pandemic.
This is not your first epidemic. In 2018, the Ebola virus lived, which decimated the northeast of your country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but did not affect the central region of Kananga, where it was born 47 years ago.
“I think of my Congo, where the sick will also starve, but we will succeed, this epidemic will also go away ”, says the nun who for several weeks has changed her nun’s cap for a protective suit, gloves and a mask.
Sister Angel visits the sick at home in Zogno, a town of 9,000 inhabitants in the province of Bergamo, where the coronavirus killed around 2,000 people out of the 17,000 who died throughout Italy.
“I am not afraid of being infected, just afraid of not being able to do everything I have to do,” she explains.
And he remembers that the hundred members of medical personnel who have died in Italy since the pandemic began “did not retreat an inch, risking their lives.”
Graduated from the Faculty of Medicine of Palermo (Sicily), She obtained the title in 2015, when she was 41 years old and had decided six years before to study medicine “so as not to be just a nun.”
Two years ago the nun responded to an announcement by the Bergamo public health agency and began to make guards at a local hospital.
At the end of March, with the arrival of the new coronavirus in Lombardy, provisionally left his convent of Canossian nuns and became part of the Usca, a health care unit specially responsible for going to the homes of patients who are infected with COVID-19 or who could be.
To encourage, to uplift
“At first they look at me in surprise, they realize that I’m not a traditional doctor, explains Angel.
“I leave them and then explain that I am not only a doctor but also a religious and they usually take it well,” he says.
Equipped from head to toeAngel takes the temperature of his patients, checks the rate of oxygen in the blood and watches for possible chronic diseases, such as diabetes or hypertension.
“Naturally, when we detect a critical condition, we call 112 (the emergency number) and request hospitalization,” he explains.
Most patients are older, some live alone and are not cared for, “not because there is no one to take care of them but because many general practitioners were infected and are in quarantine.”
Their relatives, even if they live nearby, cannot visit them because of the confinement. So the religious support is also psychological, to encourage them and break loneliness.
“It is great to have a religious who is also a doctor in our community. She is a religious full of vitality, she advises us, helps young people and their families, “explains Giorgio Carobbio, vicar of the neighboring parish of Almè.
Between 2016 and 2017, Sister Bipendu lived another human drama, that of migrants, aboard a ship of the Italian rescue body of the Order of Malta (Cisom).
Remember how he had to deliver, heal hypothermia or severe burns caused by the mixture of gasoline and seawater in the inflatable boats. But he does not like to make comparisons because they are “two different tragedies”. (I)
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