On February 7, 1996, Sr. Felicita Muthoni, a Kenyan nun belonging to the Consolata order, found herself at the dispensary of the Catrimatini mission. The facility is next to the river from which it takes its name, right in the heart of the Amazon jungle. There, along with other missionaries, she provided care for the Yanomami people, an Indigenous ethnic group living in the forest between Brazil and Venezuela.
Seriously wounded by a jaguar
That morning, she saw a man appear, who called out to her: his son-in-law, Sorino Yanomami, had been attacked by a jaguar! The animal, a female, had taken him by surprise, striking his skull with a violent blow from its paw. He had managed to keep the animal at bay with his bow and shouted for help. His relatives then arrived, causing the feline to flee.
Sr. Felicita, the dispensary nurse, rushed to the scene of the accident to provide first aid, but the situation was far worse than she had imagined. The man, half-conscious, was lying in a pool of blood. From his skull, beneath a flap of scalp torn off by the beast's claws, a little white mass of brain matter was now protruding. The nun reacted quickly, carefully placing the material back into the skull and then the scalp. But he was still bleeding profusely, and she had to make a makeshift compress from the only thing she had at the time: her shirt.
She took Sorino by car to the mission. The natives didn’t understand when she announced that she wanted to take the wounded man to hospital. They thought he was already going to live in the “other world” and wanted him to die on his own lands. Resisting threats and giving him extra care, the nun insisted and obtained permission to take him by plane to Boa Vista, the regional capital.
But before the plane took off, some of the Yanomami present declared that if their comrade died in town, far from the forest and among the “whites,” they would kill the missionaries present in Catrimani with their arrows.
By a happy coincidence, the day of his accident was also the first day of the novena in preparation for the feast of Blessed Giuseppe Allamano, founder of the Consolata missionaries. Sorino was therefore naturally entrusted to his intercession.
Miraculous full recuperation
When Sorino arrived at the hospital, Dr. José Nunes da Rocha took charge of him. However, the doctor was pessimistic at the time, as he later recounted. “Sorino's situation was very serious and the patient was breathing heavily [...] we didn't have much faith in a cure, because the way he was infected, [with the wound being] putrid and in such a ‘noble’ place as the brain, could cause encephalitis and meningitis. So we didn't have much hope, but he had arrived alive and we had to nurse him back to health, doing everything we could.”
In a coma, Sorino was operated on under anaesthesia, the wound remaining open. He eventually woke up and had to be operated on again, but he seemed to have recovered and was able to communicate. The recovery was unusually rapid, and the absence of after-effects was very surprising.
He remained in the hospital for several weeks before returning home on May 8. Little by little, he resumed his life in the forest. “When I came back from the hospital, I was like the other Yanomami: I worked, I cultivated the fields, but now I can't work anymore, because I'm old. I only work early in the morning, and when the sun is high, I go home. But I feel fine,” he told the diocesan inquiry.
Earlier this year Pope Francis recognized the healing as the second miracle needed to forward the cause of Allamano's canonization. Blessed Giuseppe Allamano will be canonized on October 20, 2024, along with 13 others.
