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Maura "Soshin" O'Halloran (May 24, 1955—October 22, 1982) was an Irish-American woman who studied
[edit] Biography
Maura O'Halloran was born Catholic, the eldest of six to an Irish father and American mother in Boston, Massachusetts on May 22, 1955. At age four Maura and her family moved to Ireland. O'Halloran was educated early on in convents run by the Sisters of Loreto in County Dublin, briefly attending Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham which Mother Teresa had once attended. In 1966 the family returned to the United States, living in Waban, Massachusetts. In 1969, when Maura was fourteen, her father was killed in an automobile accident. That following year the family moved back to Dublin. According to her late mother, Ruth O'Halloran, "Her position as the eldest child, flung into the role of second parent to five younger siblings at her father's sudden death, hastened a maturity that few adolescents experience."[1]
After finishing secondary school Maura was accepted at Trinity College, Dublin, which she entered in 1973. By 1975 she had received a coveted scholarship which paid all of her schooling expenses. She engaged in volunteerism during her college days, working with Dublin's impoverished and drug addicted. In 1976 she worked with autistic and disabled children at a Rudolph Steiner School located in Northern Ireland. She also engaged in social activism and lived a rather frugal life by this time. She traveled during vacations to areas such as Italy, Greece, North Africa, the United Kingdom and France. During the summer of 1977 she came back to the United States briefly and then moved to Toronto, Canada, where she worked to earn more money for her travels. She and a group of friends drove to San Francisco along the west coast of Canada and the United States. In San Francisco she worked various jobs and planned a trip to Latin America, learning some Spanish and studying photography while in California.[1]
Beginning in April of 1978 O'Halloran hitchhiked, drove, and walked her way across Mexico, some of Central America, much of South America—all in addition to five months spent in Cuzco, Peru doing volunteer work. She ended her tour of Latin America shortly before Christmas of 1978, arriving in Maine to spend the holiday with her family. By now she was thinking of traveling to Asia (particularly Japan), so she moved back to Boston and began waitressing to earn the money to finance such a trip. She took up activism again while there by participating in the local anti-nuclear movement, and in 1979 she showed some of the photography from her travels in an exhibition.[1]
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