Sister Lily with neighbors in Chope, Chile.
It reads like something out of an adventure film. A brave young sister challenges corrupt government and military officials to save the lives of a very unique family. Yet the experience was all too real for Sister Lillian Corriveau, one of the three original missionaries to Bánica in the Dominican Republic, when she decided to live alone for a year in Pedro Santana, a nearby Dominican town. The people there had requested her presence after seeing the good the Sisters had done in Bánica.
Sister Kay O’Connell told the exciting story of the Rescue in Pedro Santana in the “Events in Latin America: Chile, Dominican Republic, Peru” section of her book The Northeastern Province of the School Sisters of Notre Dame: Wilton, CT 1973-1989. This is an excerpt from that publication, used with permission.
Toward the end of her time [in Pedro Santana], she was suddenly faced with a very serious situation. On the morning of August 14, 1987, a white pickup truck came over the Haitian border and into Pedro Santana; it held 28 Haitian children who had become family to Dan and Kathy Blackburn, Christian missionaries from Indiana. At 3am that morning, Kathy had fled their mission at Maissade, Haiti, with her son Chuck, her sister Marianne Lortz, and 17 boys and 11 girls of all ages, some infants. The family had for months been receiving death threats at a time of strong and hysterical anti-American sentiment.
Kathy’s husband Dan and son Scott had fled in the other directions, to Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, planning to fly to the United States to raise the alarm about the plight of the abandoned children the family had gradually acquired over the previous ten years. The children had no exit visas; the Blackburns believed it was impossible to get them, and that the children would likely all be killed if they remained in Haiti. The Blackburns also knew they had no legal right to these Haitian children, no matter how much they loved them.
Sister Lillian was not completely surprised by the arrival of the packed pickup truck. Chuck and Scott had scouted the town earlier. After hearing their story, Lily had told them that when they came back she would take the two of them to the American Embassy in the capital to seek help. Instead, the Blackburns decided to flee Haiti before that could happen.
“Come along now. Follow me. If we can get to my place we’re legally safe,” Lily told Kathy, explaining that Dominican law prohibited soldiers from entering a house without a search warrant. When the children were safely being cared for by Marianne and the local women who had come flocking with food and clean clothes, Lily and Kathy set out on a dangerous ride to the nearest telephone an hour and a half away. Lily drove the parish Land Rover through four military checkpoints; each presented its own life-threatening situation, as the Dominican military tried to prevent their passage. Twice she risked bullets to the backs of their heads as she sped away from checkpoints.
At the last checkpoint, Lily was forced to leave Kathy behind, but she insisted that it be in the company of Sisters Rosemarie González and Mercedes Rosado from the nearby SSND mission in Bánica. Finally, Lily was able to telephone the American Embassy in Santo Domingo, as well as Kathy’s father in Indiana. She urged him to have everyone he knew call the U.S. State Department to make the incident known as widely as possible.
As a story in Readers Digest years later revealed, “With the story out, she knew the world would be watching. She was banking on the fact that Dominican government cared how it looked. She knew the Haitian government did not. And that was terrifying.”1
That first night back in Pedro Santana, when the boys were asleep in the church and the girls and infants in Lily’s house, armed Haitian soldiers crossed the river/border illegally, looking for the Blackburn party. Summoned to the nearby headquarters of the 100-strong Dominican army – and in the presence of the Haiti military also – Lily defied the Dominican officer who said he was under orders to hand the family over. When she demanded the orders, the officer admitted they were not written.
As the Readers Digest story detailed:
“Then you have no orders!” Lily insisted. “Orders that are not written are no orders. So if you have nothing more to say, I’m leaving.”
Lily turned and resolutely strode out of the room. It was a good 40 yards from the building to the gates of the fort. She could feel the soldiers’ eyes on her back as she stepped through the door. “I will never pass out of this place alive,” she thought.
She prayed for God’s mercy, asking that she be forgiven for her lack of faith. Then she said an Act of Contrition. Waiting for the shot, Lily wondered if she would feel it before she heard it.
She stepped up her pace and passed the soldiers at the gate without looking at them. At last the darkness enveloped her like a wonderful shield, and she knew she was safe.2
That same night, Lily went to Moso Guerrero, the town’s much-respected magistrate, who assured her that he would never sign a warrant to allow the soldiers to enter her house, where all the children were again gathered. Very late that night, when she answered a sharp knock at her door, Lily learned the men of Pedro Santana had surrounded the house, armed with baseball bats. “Tell the mother that no harm will come to her children. Sleep in peace,” one said. A few hours later, after another knock on the door, they were told that the Haitian army had just crossed back over the river. “They are gone, but we will not leave you. We will watch over you tonight,” they promised.
[Three days later, Lily was surprised by a visit from Robert Fretz, the U.S. Consul in Santo Domingo.] She had met Mr. Fretz when he visited Pedro Santana a while earlier with his new wife. Officially, he had come to make sure of the safety of the four Americans. Unofficially, he told Lily that the best way to prevail with the Dominican government was to publicize the Blackburns’ plight.
In the Readers Digest piece, author Henry Hurt explained how Sister Lily had done just that.
Lily and Mayor Gomera began contacting newspapers and TV stations. Soon reporters and film crews rolled into town. They told the story of the Haitian invasion, and, of course, they loved the tale of the Indiana missionary and her 28 orphans being saved by a defiant, blockade-running nun.
With the spotlight on, it was unlikely the Dominican military would cooperate with another attempt to seize the children. After two weeks, Kathy made a trip to Santo Domingo to plead with bureaucrats to let the children stay. Her efforts paid off. Word came that Dominican President Joaquin Balaguer intended to designate the Blackburn family as humanitarian refugees.3
Lily then knew that the family was safe. By September, Dan Blackburn joined his family, and they were all settled in a house on a secluded bluff near the Dominican resort town of Jarabacoa. Lily slipped quietly out of town (when the incident began, she had already purchased her plane ticket for the States and had been planning to leave).
By Christmastime 1989, the story had a happy ending. Each child received documentation to enter the United States, and Pan American Airways flew the family to Indianapolis.
- Hurt, Henry, “Deliver Us From Evil,” Readers Digest, July 1995, pp. 184, 186-87
- Hurt, Henry, “Deliver Us From Evil,” Readers Digest, July 1995, p 188
- Hurt, Henry, “Deliver Us From Evil,” Readers Digest, July 1995, p 190
After this adventure, Sister Lily briefly returned to the States, but answered a call to become vocation director in Chile in 1988. She later was a pioneer on the island of Puluqui off the southern coast of Chile. In August 2006, she joined 19 SSNDs and four postulants in Kenya, East Africa. Of those 23, 18 were native Africans. Sister Lily now lives at Villa Notre Dame in Wilton, CT.
