Marjatta, now 70, traveled from Finland in October to attend a number of activities that marked the 30th anniversary of Hengchun Christian Hospital's handover from a group of Finnish missionaries, including herself, to the local Chinese Christian Medical Mission.

She also took time to visit her Taiwanese godchildren and to gain a better understanding of the hospital's plan to establish a long-term care center.

Marjatta, born in 1939, came to Taiwan for the first time in 1957 as a healthcare missionary. She was a winner of the prestigious Medical Contribution Award presented by the non-profit Health, Welfare & Environment Foundation under the auspices of the Legislative Yuan and the Department of Health.

In a recorded interview Sunday on the local cable television channel TVBS, Marjatta recalled that in her first year in Taiwan she was strongly tempted to give up and go home mainly because of the language barrier.

After surmounting that hurdle by quickly picking up the Taiwanese dialect and some aboriginal languages, she stopped thinking about leaving and remained in Pingtung for 41 consecutive years, she said.

She recalled that she was one of five nurses at the hospital, which was just a small clinic in the first few years after it was founded.

Apart from working as an evangelical missionary and a nurse, she was also the only person at the clinic who could drive the doctors to the rural areas to make house calls, she said.

Marjatta recalled that she became popular among the poor and the sick in the Hengchun area because she visited leprosy and tuberculosis patients at home and attended to them without wearing gloves or a mask. She said the locals knew that they would not be rejected if they approached "Miss Ma" for help.

However, Marjatta said, she disappointed a number of people who tried to match her with several Pingtung men.

"My short temper made me a bad candidate for marriage to any Taiwanese man," Marjatta said with a smile.

She said she was greatly concerned about the happiness of foreign brides in Taiwan and sometimes mediated disputes between foreign spouses and their Taiwanese mothers-in-law or between foreign brides and marriage brokers.

Referring to Taiwan as her home away home, Marjatta said that even after she returned to Finland to take care of her mother, now 90, she would unwittingly answer the phone in Taiwanese when it rang.

(By Deborah Kuo)