Locally she's known as a conflict resolution specialist, but Sister Lois Aceto has a colorful past that includes 17 years in Bolivia doing everything from teaching religion in schools to keeping young people out of the brothels to studying medicine.

She was even arrested twice for speaking out against the government there.

It is these experiences that made her the woman she is today and, for that reason, Aceto recently had a book about her time in Bolivia published. It is called, "Journeying toward Justice."

"It changed me completely," Sister Aceto said of her South American adventures. "I loved it, every minute of it. It taught me how to rely on the providence of God. You learn how to walk with God, all the time."

In 1964 Sister Aceto was 33 years old. She had been teaching school in the Racine area for 14 years, but it had always been her dream to be a missionary in a foreign country. In October of that year she got her chance. She and three other Dominican Sisters were sent to Bolivia.

"I went there kind of naive about many things," Aceto said.

After spending five months in Lima, Peru, learning Spanish, the four nuns arrived in Bolivia. They were not given any specific directions on what they were to do when they arrived. "We didn't even have a place to stay," Aceto said.

They spent their early days riding the buses in La Paz, which is the political capital of Bolivia. Sister Aceto soon found herself teaching religion in the public schools.

"I worked with the youth in the city," Sister Aceto said. She formed a group of high school and college students to work on justice issues, which was tricky at the time.

In the 17 years Sister Aceto lived and worked in Bolivia, the country was under a dictatorship. "You can't talk against the government without getting arrested, which I was twice," she said.

Some of the other projects Aceto took on in those years included starting a little library and opening a hospital with eight beds. She also taught her older students how to teach younger children. "The education in Bolivia is very bad," Sister Aceto said.

While she was there, she even started a school for the blind, which required her to learn braille. She started the first co-ed dorms in La Paz. Other duties she assumed in Bolivia were censoring movies on Saturdays, and keeping minors out of the brothels.

"Boy, was that an education, let me tell you," she said with a laugh. "I'm always doing things I'm not prepared to do."

Sister Aceto traveled outside of La Paz to help those in surrounding communities. In Achachicala, a poor town on the outskirts of the capital, she started working with the sick. "I found out they didn't have anywhere to go," she said. "So we started an outpatient clinic."

In Tarija, a little city bordering Argentina, Sister Aceto supervised the orphanages. It was there that she took a group of 25 children, who were delinquents and street kids, and formed a group called New Hope. "It was beautiful," she said. "It's still going, by the way."

Her book also includes a chapter on the time she spent in Madrid, Spain, studying medicine as a way to better help the poor in need of medical care in Bolivia. "It was quite a challenge," Aceto said. "(The work) was all in Spanish."

But she succeeded in obtaining a certificate in midwifery and finished an eight-week course on leprosy.

In 1981, when her father became very ill, Sister Aceto came home to the United States. "That was heart-rendering," she said. "I haven't been back (to Bolivia)."

But here she found a new way to pursue justice, in programs such as Restorative Justice and the Conflict Resolution Center housed at Neighborhood Watch, of which she is the director. Sister Aceto spends her time training others to be mediators and teaching conflict resolution in area prisons.

It's been more than 20 years since she came back to Racine, but still feels the story of her time in South America has value.

"I feel driven to share my story, hopeful that - although it cannot mean as much to you as it does to me - you will accept it, nonetheless, as another small component of the human condition," Sister Aceto writes in the preface of "Journeying toward Justice."

"For this is not merely one woman's story: it symbolizes many of us - unknown, perhaps to all but a few - but people earnest, zealous, dedicated to serving God in the way we feel called, to engaging ourselves in the struggle for peace and justice in the world.

"I have changed from the naive, youthful exuberant woman I was. But even now, in my 70s, I retain my enthusiastic desire, my compulsion, to journey toward justice."

Sister Aceto's book is available online at http://www.lulu.com