Founder of Project Dawn and retired physician, Sister Mary Carmen Gannon, who dedicated years of service to Guyana, died of stroke complications at age 79 last Tuesday in the US.
Gannon created Project Dawn (Donors and Workers Now) in 1985 to bring free medical aid to Guyana. She organized volunteer specialty teams of physicians, surgeons and support personnel who visited Guyana four times a year.
In 1994 the government of Guyana honored Gannon and former President Jimmy Carter. Gannon received a Medal of Service for years of “voluntary contributions“ to Guyana.
More recently, in 2007, she worked with the U.S. Navy, Air Force and Coast Guard, as well as with the Guyanese public health service and Canadian forces, when the U.S. medical services ship Comfort — which is often docked at Locust Point — visited Guyana.
According to a report in the Baltimore Sun, Gannon died at the Sisters of Mercy Convent in Savannah, Georgia.
She was born Theresa Gannon in Baltimore, Maryland and raised on Ensor Street in East Baltimore. Gannon was the daughter of an Irish-born mother and a father who had a horse-drawn coaching business and later operated a limousine service. She was a 1949 graduate of the Institute Notre Dame, where she played sports.
Gannon, the Baltimore Sun said, attended the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing and later entered the Sisters of Mercy. It was then she received the name Mary Carmen. Gannon then earned a bachelor of science from Loyola College and a master’s degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore.
She subsequently spent five years at the Mahaica Hospital, in what was then British Guiana, as assistant administrator and director of nursing service. She worked with patients with leprosy, or Hansen’s disease.
“She loved the people there [Guyana] and adored the children,” said a friend and fellow retired nurse, M. Carol Horne of Savannah. “She was happy as a lark when she was there. She always wanted to go back. The people had nothing.”
Gannon later returned to the US and earned a medical degree at the George Wash-ington University School of Medicine. She served her internship and internal medicine residencies at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, S.C. and practiced medicine in Savannah where she held administrative posts at hospitals operated by her religious order.
Several years later, in 1985, Gannon founded Project Dawn to bring free medical aid to Guyanese. She often recruited medical acquaintances, including two Baltimore ophthalmologists, Dr. Leeds and Dr. Brett Katzen to help in this cause.
“She saw the great need for surgery in Guyana,” said Sister Annella Martin, a Sister of Mercy who lives in Baltimore.
A Mass of Christian burial was offered Friday at Saint Frances Cabrini Church in Savannah for Gannon.
