María Teresalina Sánchez, FMM (13 July 1918 – 27 October 1947) was a Spanish Franciscan religious sister who served as a missionary to Kashmir.
[1][2] She was born Joaquina de Z. Sánchez on July 13, 1918, in the village of Sondika, Biscay, called Bidegain, into a large family of seventeen children.
At eleven years of age she became a boarder in the teaching college in Orduña run by the Sisters of the Company of Mary, Our Lady, where she volunteered until the end of her studies at the Missionary Center of Bilbao.
[3] In 1936, at the age of 18, she thought of becoming a Carmelite nun, but doing so was impossible due to the Spanish Civil War then raging in Spain.
She then began to work as a nurse in the municipal hospital of Bilbao, but in May 1937 she went into exile with her family as a result of the fight, settling in Cambo-les-Bains in southern France.
Due to the illness and death of her father and other circumstances, however, she did not enter until 1940, after the family returned to Spain, where she was admitted as a candidate at the convent in Pamplona.
[6] Tribesmen from Northern Frontier, (what is today known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) took advantage of the situation and attacked, wrecking everything on their passage.
While heading to Srinigar,[7] they attacked Baramulla,[8] which was on the route to that city, where they looted the church and convent, stealing everything that appeared to be valuable.
she endured a long agony of ten hours, losing blood "until the last drop" as her motto had stated, in acute pain that could not be alleviated due to a lack of sedatives.
[9][10][11] Besides Sánchez, five other people were killed by the tribesmen, both staff and patients, including a British officer and his wife, who was in labor at the time.