Her own kin live thousands of miles away, but Sister Richard Marie Toal will be surrounded by family today as she marks her 94th birthday.

Toal lives in a Manoa convent with other Sisters of St. Francis, the Catholic religious order she joined at age 17. The blue-eyed Irishwoman still carries a hint of her ancestry and her New Jersey birthplace in her speech, even after 50 years in the islands.

Others who will beat a path to the convent door today are soul sisters of another sort, nurses who worked with her at Kalaupapa, Molokai, in service at the hospital for leprosy patients there. Toal was a nurse at Kalaupapa for 40 years, holding supervisory roles in the early days and continuing to work in the outpatient dressing clinic until a stroke five years ago forced her to leave the Molokai settlement she loved.

“;I remember that most of the patients there called her 'Mother,' and they still do,”; said retired practical nurse Frances Padeken. “;She was like a mother to them. She was that close and they trusted her. She is genuine. She lives her vows.”;

Padeken said nurses remember Toal as “;great to work for,”; adding, “;She was strict and very meticulous in her work, one of the old school of nursing.”;

Nurse Julie Sigler, still on duty at Kalaupapa, said, “;We all remember what a fisherman she was.”;

Toal, wearing a white habit and veil, the nun uniform of the past, would wade into knee-deep water and spend hours fly-casting. A framed photograph of “;the fishing nun”; from a book by Richard Cooke III hangs on a wall in the convent, and a similar shot appeared in National Geographic magazine.

“;She doesn't like fish,”; Sigler said, repeating an often-told story. Toal would share her catch with the patients and with the convent cats. Fishing tournaments were part of the social life at Kalaupapa, and prizes were awarded for largest and longest and best fighter. A category for the most fish caught was discontinued after Sister Richard Marie won it with little consistent challenge.

These days, the nun spends hours in the convent chapel. People ask for her prayers. Her answer is, “;I always pray for you.”;

Toal said many memories are fading: “;I'm getting old, you know.”;

The olden days are the clearest memories. Orphaned at 8, she was raised by her grandparents. Her sister and two brothers entered religious life before her.

“;They are all gone, ahead of me,”; she said.

She tells of the great satisfaction it was to work in the footsteps of Mother Marianne Cope, the Franciscan nun who brought other sisters to Hawaii in response to King Kalakaua's appeal for help in caring for the victims of leprosy, as the disease spread in the mid-1800s. Cope is a candidate for sainthood in the Catholic church for her work at Kalaupapa.

“;I took care of her grave. We cleared leaves and brought flowers,”; said Toal, a link in the time line of Franciscan sisters who have worked in the leprosy settlement since Cope's time.

Knowing Toal as they do, friends will come bearing pizza and chocolates today, gifts that will be shared with the family.

“;If she has chocolates and coffee, she's happy,”; said Sister Rose Loraine Matsuzaki.

The walls of her convent room hold mementos of Kalaupapa: a poem by a patient, a sketch by another, a photograph of the Bishop Home convent where she lived for 40 years.

There is a small unframed text on the wall that reads, “;Share my time in a sense of poverty. To live simply. Initiate the conversation. Make time for others. Encourage generosity of spirit.”; Author unknown, but the practitioner is still in the room.