Two of the women who show up this day need medical treatment, one for diabetes and high blood pressure, the other for a persistent skin rash.

Sister Stella-Maris, who taught nurses before she began serving the poor, listens and looks, and when the women have gone, she declares her disciples must do more here in Ogden, one of five U.S cities where Pro Labore Dei has taken root.

"They need to move forward. All they are doing is feeding and clothes," Sister Stella-Maris says. "It looks like they need to do health now."

If the Nigerian nun seems demanding, it's because she sees great need in America, just as in her native country, where she began taking care of those who suffer, she says, on the direct order of God in 1990.

The movement she founded, Pro Labore Dei - For the Labor of God - now has branches in 22 cities and towns in Nigeria, feeding thousands

daily, educating children in four schools, sending medical vans in search of the ill, visiting prisoners and shut-ins and a host of other services.

A mystic and a charismatic leader, Sister Stella-Maris has earned a nickname, at least among her U.S. members. They call her "Mother Teresa of Nigeria."

In the United States, a handful of lay members of Pro Labore Dei in each of five cities - Madison and Milwaukee in Wisconsin, Chicago,

Las Vegas and Ogden - have been feeding lunch to hungry people and providing toiletries and other necessities twice a week.

The chapter in Madison has been at it for five years, while Ogden's three Pro Labore Dei members and one volunteer have been feeding the poor for just a few months. The Utah coordinator, Geradette Banaszak-Barkey, also has been writing and visiting shut-ins, widows and widowers for several years.

The Ibadan, Nigeria-based movement has 12 consecrated virgins, as Pro Labore nuns are called, hundreds of trained lay members and a like number of volunteers.

Besides Nigeria and the United States, the movement has three chapters in Sierra Leone and two in Great Britain.

While it is a Catholic organization, anyone who shares a "radical" commitment to the poor, and who does not reject Pro Labore's statutes and the Roman Catholic Church's teachings is welcome to join.

Sister Stella-Maris was in Utah for two weeks this month to meet with community members and to lead a weeklong silent retreat for 10 U.S. members, who gathered in Ogden Valley.

The annual retreat, says Barkey, "is basically a booster shot of spirituality."

Her older brother, Steve Banaszak of Madison, one of the original Pro Labore Dei members in the United States, muses that learning about serving the poor from the Nigerian nun might be akin to the experience of those who met Mother Teresa before she was widely known.

Mother Teresa, too, visited Ogden Valley. She was at the Abbey of the Holy Trinity Monastery in 1972.

Sister Stella-Maris, says Steve Banaszak, taps into a yearning he feels to do something for others in a messed-up world.

"At first I was doing it because Sister asked," says Banaszak. "Now there's something in me that's moving. My heart has come around."

That Sister Stella-Maris has such an effect on people is in part due to her confidence that she's doing the Lord's work.

Visions of heaven and God

Born to a well-off family in Jos in northern Nigeria, in 1956, Sister Stella-Maris attended Catholic schools from the time she was 6.

Her family, however, was Anglican. In fact, her great-grandfather had been the first African Anglican missionary in that part of Africa. Her grandmother was a nurse who set up her own clinic, a rarity in Nigeria in the early 20th century. Her father managed a company and her mother worked as a chief in the transcription service for the Nigerian Assembly.

When Stella-Maris expressed a desire to become a nun at age 12, her father threatened to pull her from Catholic school.

Likewise, when she told family about the visions she'd been given of heaven and of God showering her with gifts, she was punished.

In one vision before she was 11, Sister Stella-Maris remembers, she experienced lightning, thunder and a slide show across her bedroom wall of the sins she must avoid. Her sister sharing the room saw and heard none of it.

At age 17, when she finished high school and presented herself at a convent intent on becoming a nun, she was shocked to learn she had to first become Catholic by receiving the sacraments of Holy Communion, Reconciliation and Confirmation. She was already baptized Christian.

Thus began a five-year battle with her mother, whose histrionics Sister Stella-Maris recounts today with all the affection and humor of a daughter who eventually got her way.

At one point, her mother, gazing at a picture of Christ and recalling Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac, tearfully told God he could have her daughter, but asked that he take her before she was 50 since her daughter wouldn't be there to care for her in her old age.

Her young daughter was aghast. But she didn't forget her mother's plea. In 1983, her mother died in Sister Stella-Maris' arms. She was 49.

Marching orders

Stella-Maris entered the novitiate of an order in Nigeria shortly after she finished nursing school in Benin - and after a trip home in which her father finally gave his blessing. She took her final vows in 1981 and within two years, she was teaching other nurses and became a principal of her order's nursing school.

While staying in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1990, Sister Stella-Maris was in deep contemplation in the convent chapel when she heard the words, "Stella! My people are suffering and you are sitting down here."

She looked around and saw no one. "I asked, 'Who is speaking and who are the people who are suffering? Who are they?' "

Immediately, what looked like a 5-by-7-inch picture flashed from her right, showing people of all ages, some crippled, some lepers, all hungry. "I could see miserable people," Sister Stella-Maris recalls.

Over the course of the following nights, when she rose to pray, discerning whether it was God speaking, Sister Stella-Maris was given her marching orders, which she wrote in a journal.

At one point, after being led to read a passage in the Old Testament's Jeremiah referring to the potter and clay, she felt transported to the potter's workshop and felt herself kneaded as if she were a lump of clay.

"I felt twisted and pulled. The pain was severe."

Crying, she heard God say to her: "And now, Stella, can I not do with you what the potter has done with the clay?"

She recalls answering "Yes, Lord! Yes! Yes, you can!"

Within days, she was searching for the poor in Ibadan, using her own pocket money to buy food, making rosaries from scavenged copper wire and seeds from the tree known as Agbala Maria.

"Anywhere I took my rosaries, people bought them. Whatever price I put on them, people paid."

With that money, she bought fabric and sewed beautiful baby dresses, which sold quickly for a good price at a local hospital.

Within two weeks, she was feeding 250 people lunch each day, and soon God told her to educate children of the poor, promising to send her teachers, she says. She opened a school in the open air in the poorest neighborhood of the city. It had 150 students on the first day.

Care for the poor

In 1992, with the blessing of the local Catholic bishop, Sister Stella-Maris left her order and formed Pro Labore Dei, using an inheritance from her parents.

Its headquarters is a 16-acre campus in Ibadan, where she lives with the children who attend that original Pro Labore Dei school, no longer in the open air.

Sister Stella-Maris hates to travel. She considers flying to be her "cross to bear."

But she comes to the United States, as she does everything else, she says, because God told her to.

In 2001, she says, she was inspired to tell people in the United States to take care of their poor and their widows.

"I was surprised. I didn't know America had poor," she says.

Neither did some of those she first met and enlisted in Madison, Wis.

"We kept telling her there are no poor in our city," recalls Banaszak.

Eventually, they walked the streets to find them, and after passing out 14 sack lunches, were rewarded by an a cappella rendition of "Amazing Grace" from a homeless man.

"This is one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life, but also the most rewarding," says Jim Flad, another original Pro Labore Dei member in Madison.

Gie Best, a retired Madison schoolteacher who joined the group a year ago, says her prayer life led her to the work. "I told myself, 'Get up from your knees and do something for people!' "

In Ogden, Paul Ironhorse says he enjoys the food the Pro Labore Dei members bring to his neighborhood.

"It makes me feel good," says Ironhorse, who is about to be evicted. "You know you're not going to be hungry on Wednesday and Saturday."

"It's appreciated, but when you gotta live down by the river in a sleeping bag, it's rough," says a homeless man who declines to give his name.

Emilio Cristobal Gallegos, a volunteer who wears the distinctive Pro Labore Dei orange apron as he helps serve lunch, says the work has given his life more meaning.

"I can hardly wait to get up in the morning," says Gallegos. "I love it! I love it! I'm helping people out, just talking to them."

Sister Stella-Maris says she doesn't know what to expect in Utah or the United States, whether the work will spread. That is her hope.

"He does not need a large army to fight his battle," she says. "It's not the numbers of members that matter. It's the zeal."

kmoulton@sltrib.com