Oblate sisters nurse cholera patients at the Baltimore almshouse

In 1832 Archibald Stirling, a trustee of the Office of the Poor in Baltimore, asked for four Oblate sisters to care for cholera patients at the almshouse. They went. Stirling wrote to their chaplain about it on 25 September that year. The convent by then was also a school whose pupils were mostly children of Haitian families: fifteen day students who went home in the afternoon, twelve boarders who stayed until the end of term, and orphans described as children of the house. Two of the day pupils, Marie Jacques and a girl recorded only as Henriette, had their expenses paid by a seminary priest and by the wife of a refugee pharmacist. The sisters also took in older women. Betsy Duchemin, the mother of one of them, eventually became a sister herself, and Annette Lange came from Matanzas in 1836 and spent her last year as a boarder.