At the invitation of the Vincentian priests to do pastoral work with the English-speaking Caribbean population, the first three Maryknoll Sisters arrived in Panama on November 1, 1943.

They collaborated with Colegio San Vicente started by the Vincentian Fathers in 1920, and turned over to the Sisters in 1945. Ministries soon involved the Spanish-speaking Panamanians with home visiting and catechetics. Four days after their arrival, they visited Palo Seco where patients with Hansen’s disease (leprosy) were committed in former times. Over the years Maryknoll Sisters have been present there in many ways, so they decided to celebrate their fifty years in Panama in 1993 at Palo Seco, now called Brisas del Mar, a residence for Third Age people which was developed by a Maryknoll Sister to help the elderly who lost their homes during the U.S. invasion in 1989.

Some of the former patients, elderly, their disease inactive, still live there. In 1954 in Puerto Armuelles, the Sisters opened the first high school in the remote western banana-producing part of the country. Ministries have varied from radio programs for rural areas of Veraguas to building small Christian communities; from teaching at the Catholic University and the seminary to a center for training young lay women volunteers to serve in priestless areas; from evangelization and pastoral work in urban and rural areas to a pastoral center in the rain forest of Darien for Christian formation, environmental and ecology education and training health promoters.