Tina’s hurt heart full of love for orphans

by PETER GRACE
A woman raised in Dublin slums has for more than quarter of a century been working in Vietnam and Mongolia to help children in those countries.

Christina Noble is the inspiration for the film Noble, to be released in New Zealand
on May 28, about her work in Asia.
Christina and her brothers and sisters grew up materially impoverished in The Liberties
in Dublin, with a hardworking mother and an alcoholic father. She says her dad spent
most of the family’s money at the pub. Her mother died, the family was split apart, she ran away from an orphanage and lived in a hole in a park, and she was gang-raped when she
was 16.
Later driven to near insanity by overwork and a violent husband, she found in a dream the will to fight back. She had dreamed of Vietnam, and her hope lay in a determination
to work among the bui doi, the street children of Vietnam.
She told NZ Catholic on April 30, talking by phone from Ireland, that her own children understood her work for children in Asia, because they were brought up with her talking about “the dream”.
“I would tell them a story and it didn’t make sense — but it makes sense today,” she said.
She began her work in Asia in 1989 on her own, and today the Christina Noble Children’s
Foundation cares directly for 700,000 children. “And there’s indirect — with families — about 300 to 400,000. Over one million, anyway.

“But it’s great, you know, to see the kids when they graduate and then, you know, have their own job.”
She just recently got a letter from one of them, she said, and recalled when he and his brother first arrived. “They were very scared. The mother had passed and there was no one left.”
They had no shoes and they were hungry. When they met she said to him, “What do you want?” and he said, “Mama Tina, I want to go to school”. He wished he was with the children when he saw them with their schoolbags.
Some of the youngsters go into medicine, some go into accounting, some go into architecture, others into teaching. “All kinds of stuff… And I know then we have done
our job.”
Christina Noble plays down her work. “There’s no big deal looking after children… The
big deal is getting money.”
She points out that it’s one thing to say they are caring for more than a million kids, but they have to ask themselves, “What are the results, and what’s happening to them”?
“And I can tell you they are working their butts off to study.”
They tell the kids that they have got them into school, and they have the same chance
as anybody else. “But what we can’t do is study for you.”
The kids are told there are only two ways in life. One way is up and the other way is down. “And they never forget it.”
Despite her early bad experiences, some of which were at the hands of Catholic Church people, she still loves The Lord.
“There’s good and bad in people in all places,” she said. There are some who misuse religion to do whatever they want to do.
“I have a love for Our Lady and St Francis,” she said.
She tells a story about calling overseas in her early years in Vietnam.
There was an old black phone in the village, and it had to be booked in advance for her
once a week call.
“And I picked it up and there was no string on it — it wasn’t connected at all…
“And I said, ‘I’m calling God’, and I didn’t end the ‘connection’.”
To this day, the man at the phone puts his hand to his ear when he sees her. Even though she can’t always get to Mass, she talks to God.
She once got a disease in one of her feet, and ended up in a wheelchair. The pain got
worse and worse.
“The specialist said, ‘There’s no cure, Christina’, and I said to The Lord, ‘I don’t know why I have this disease … is this because you want me to stop the work or something’?”
“You know, the next morning, and this is true to God, next morning I got up and there was not a mark on my foot. I went down to the clinic and said, ‘Doc, I want to show you something’ and took my shoes off and he said, ‘My goodness, Christina, it’s divine
intervention. That’s all I can say.’”
So people can say what they like, about maybe it’s a coincidence, she said. “I love Our Lord, and I don’t care what anybody says.”
She talks to him sometimes about money, because sometimes finding the money to keep the foundation running is a big problem.
Will the film Noble help, then? Christina thinks it’s too early to say, although it should help get more people interested in the work.
She is still hands on, she said, and sees herself continuing until the day she dies.
“The love of my life is [being] out with the kids.”