The Angel of Saigon,
Daily Mail Weekend,
19 July 1997

When Hai heard the rubbish truck come rumbling past his shack, he grabbed his torch and ran after it. You had to be first to get the best stuff, which was the way all the other children were thinking.

Ahead of the competition, he chased the tail lights as the two-tonner wound its way through the mountains of rubbish. Even in the dark, he could see it was stacked with plastic bags and there would be some things in it he could sell for sure. Hai was right behind the truck when it stopped but he didn't expect it to go into reverse. Before he could cry out he was knocked flat on his back and the wheels were squashing the frail 11-year old to within an inch of his life.

When the people from the huts found him, Hai was almost cut in half. They lifted him carefully into a small pick-up and drove him through the night to Saigon. Pressed into the wet mud was a perfect mould of the accident-Hai's arms and legs spread-eagled and a fat tyre imprint running over the torso.

The surgeons worked frantically to keep him alive and put him back together. But one of the medical team was already thinking: "If he doesn't go to God, we'll give him to His angel, Mama Tina."

Hai was in danger of having his life squeezed out of him all over again when, months later, he was well enough to meet Christina Noble. Hobbling on crutches into the headquarters of her children's foundation, he was overwhelmed as the large blonde woman dropped to her knees beside him, ran her hands through his hair, showered him with kisses and whispered in her Irish brogue: "You're all right now, little one; I'll be taking care of you."

She understood when Hai said he didn't want to leave his family and friends in the shacks by the rubbish tip, but she wasn't going to let him go away just like that, so she gave him a teddy bear, promised him a bicycle, and within weeks had provided the poverty-stricken community with a small wooden stall where they could sell odds and ends that they'd found and cleaned from the tip.

And when she walked down the track last week to see her young friend, she was mobbed by children and their parents, wearing the best clothes they could muster, who wanted to thank her for what she had done. But Tina hadn't come to be lauded-she was on a mission to see what else she could do for these people.

"That woman over there," she said to her Vietnamese assistant, Helen. "Look at those sunken cheeks, I think she's got TB. And that young one, I think he's got respiratory trouble. We've got to help these people Helen. Make a note of that." How many notebooks has Helen filled with the names of the desperate souls who have had the good fortune to come to the notice of the 52-year-old woman they call the Mother Theresa of Vietnam?

There were 50,000 street urchins when she arrived in Saigon-officially known as Ho Chi Minh City-in 1989 and although she has helped 60,000 over the years, there are still countless thousands more being born in the slums and walking in their rags from the forests and bomb-cratered fields every year.

"If I look at the big picture, trying to help all of those people all at once with some big master plan, it's a daunting task. So I help who I can at the time, chipping away at the despair a bit at a time. You've got to be strong. You cannot stop. You have to work day and night. You cannot rest because the people who need you are unable to rest."

"Do I cry? Oh yes. I cry. I go home at night sometimes and I bawl my eyes out at the hopelessness and the frustrations. I think about the little ones sleeping on the streets and I want to go right back out and collect them all and bring them all home with me because I know what it's like to live from hand to mouth without a roof over your head."

Christina was born in a garret in Dublin, the daughter of a drunken bare-knuckled prize fighter and an invalid mother. At nine, she contracted TB, and, later she watched through a hospital window as her mother died of a haemorrhage. Her father abandoned her and she was put into the care of foster parents, who starved and beat her. Before she was 12, she had been consistently sexually abused by a close relative.

By then she was a street child, sleeping in sheds, living off market-stall scraps. She was later committed to four desperate years in an institute in the west of Ireland. When she escaped, she lived the life of an urchin in a hole she dug with her own hands in Dublin's Phoenix Park. She tried selling shamrocks for a few coins, she was cursed at, kick and gang-raped, becoming pregnant as a result and giving birth to a boy who was taken form her against her will.

Even marriage to the first man who showed her a glimmer of kindness after running away to England was to bring misery, when her husband proved to be an unfaithful wife-beater. She bore him three children, Helen, Nicolas and Androula, but also suffered a miscarriage.

Eventually she had to have shock treatment for a mental breakdown and depression. Then, among the nightmares, came a strange dream. She saw naked children running down a dirt road fleeing from a napalm bomb, a scene from a well-known war photograph. But in the dream these children were running towards her as the ground opened up beneath them. She reached out and picked up a little girl and in the sky a brilliant white light spelled out the word Vietnam.

"It took 20 years for that dream to come true," says Tina as she prepares to meet a hungry mother and her children who have come to the Christina Noble Children's Foundation centre, a complex of buildings that includes a medical unit, an intensive care unit where seriously malnourished children are treated, and a school. "Now the little ones are coming to me and they reach out their arms and I'm there to lift them up. Always believe in your dreams."

Among the many who come to see her is Le Thi Thuy, a 34-year-old mother who looks ten years older. She has a baby at her withered breast, three young boys at her side and says she has left two others with their father at their forest shack near the Cambodian border. She clutches a crumpled piece of paper on which someone has written "Mama Tina" and the foundation's address.

"My baby is sick," she tells Christina through an interpreter, although the Irish woman can pick up enough of the words and read enough of the body language to understand the reason for the visit. "I have no money to pay for any treatment." Christina immediately tells her staff to make arrangements for all the children to be checked over in the medical unit. "I act on impulse, do things when they need to be done, which is always right now. I don't put things off, tell them to come back later. These people want help like yesterday."

A teenager scooped off the streets months before and now a keen student at her school, pokes his head around the door. She grins and smacks his hand with a high five. "You're a little s--t," she says and he erupts into laughter. They're used to her curses. It's what she calls breaking through, using her street talk to communicate not just words but emotions. "Oh hell, I'm breaking rules all the time. People kindly give us donations and we can never get enough, but sometimes you get the people who question the way I spend it. I took the kids to the seaside and bought them all ice cream and somebody said that wasn't the way to spend charity money and I said, "Bloody hell, it brought a smile to their faces for the first time in their lives. Twenty bucks worth of ice cream is a cheap price to pay for a busload of children's smiles."

She's a human whirlwind, picking up phones, running from one office to another, tossing out instructions. Within minutes of despatching the first mother and her children-all clutching brightly wrapped presents, they first they've ever had-for a medical check-up, she's assessing a couple who have brought in their six-year-old daughter. The mother's hair is falling out, leaving ugly bald patches. The father-no education, no skills, no job, toothless, matchstick thin-is nervously clutching a Redskins baseball cap.

"Don't be intimidated by me because I'm a foreigner," she explains. "I'm like you. I used to live on the streets. I know what it's like to be hungry. I know what it's like to have a pain in your belly."

The father, Tran Van Hung, says he used to work on the fishing boats but there aren't any jobs any more. Christina promises she'll help him if he's ready to help himself. "I'll try to get something for you. What do you want to do?" Hung's jaw drops. He is being offered a choice for the first time in his life. But his scope and imagination are limited. He says he wants to sell things from a cart. He can find tins and plastic and old shoes in the streets and sell enough to keep his family, perhaps get them off the pavement and pay for a small room somewhere. "And what about your daughter's education?" Tina asks softly, because she is already wondering if Hung will be able to make enough to feed and clothe them all and put a roof over their heads. Before he can answer she's reaching over and touching young Oanh and asking her if she'd like to go to the centre's Sunshine School. Oanh smiles and shyly nods and Tina tells her she is lovely and everything's going to be all right from now on and she can even wear a school uniform if she wants to. When the family have left she sits a boy on her lap and bursts into song..."My name is Betty Grable, I'm the leader of the band..." She has a good voice which she uses at times in restaurants and clubs, and when the Western clients stop clapping, she tells them about her work and soon she's collecting donations.

Now she suddenly stops and tells a staff member to be sure to check out the last family. "Occasionally we get people who try to abuse the system. I think those people are genuine, but there are some who just want handouts and we're not here to do that. I'm handling other people's money-I have to be very careful that it brings a little help and happiness only to those who really need it."

There's a phone call from the British consul to tell her that former England and West Ham footballer Trevor Brooking, who was in Vietnam recently, has chosen the Foundation's Junior Football Team, made up of street children, as the most deserving charity and the centre is to receive a computer as a prize. Tina is up and dancing around the office and then she's making arrangements to round up the team and treat them all to ice cream that very afternoon. Oh, and get a silver cup engraved, she asks her look-alike daughter Helen, who is working at the centre for a few months putting together the children's orchestra. "And put $5 in an envelope for each of the players,' she adds.

Dresses in their bright yellow soccer gear, the boys are driven to town through teeming streets where they once begged and stole. Through the window of the bus they see in others what they once were, children with haunted faces trying to sell chewing gum, offering old newspapers that someone has begged from an airline, trying to find customers for a shoe shine; not clever enough to work up a con, they resort to anything that will pay for the next meal, including bag snatching.

It is a microcosm of hell, much of the physical horror a legacy of the Vietnam war and Agent Orange-children with stumps of arms and legs, blindness, deafness and hideous cleft palates. It goes on day after day, hour by hour, minute by minute. But all they'll get from Tina is a card with her name on it as she tells them to come and see her because she knows she'll then be able to assess whether they're professional beggars or really in desperate need of help.

"I don't want to be seen as some kind of saint-that's the last reason I'm here-but I'm very much aware that a lot of people are looking to me for salvation and guidance. They all need help. You can't ignore them because they're in rags or haven't had a wash. You've go to look at their hearts, not at the way they look. Any you've got to remember their dignity. They all have that and you've got to let them keep it."

Her daughter Helen is more forthright about Christina's work in Saigon. "My mum," she says proudly, "is an inspiration to us all. She's met Princess Anne and Mother Theresa and lots of personalities and there's talk about making a full-length feature film about her life-Helen Mirren's name has come up to play her-but those things don't mean anything to her. She gets more joy out of seeing a child smile for the first time. That's my mum."

What drives her? Is it a knee-jerk reaction unleashed as a result of her own miserable childhood? "Who can say what motivates me?" says Christina. "I have a very good relationship with The Man Upstairs and maybe that's where it all comes from. I don't really question it. I just do what I know I must do and I'll leave it to others to work out why."

Then she's off to the crowded, steamy marketplace to buy fruit and flowers for one of her helpers in the office. "I've got a feeling about something," she says and then she's hurrying off down the street. She returns ten minutes later at the side of a boy on crutches, waiting patiently as the child flings his polo-damaged legs forward for the next step. "This is Hieu. He's been my little friend for a long time. Something told me he was here somewhere and when I went down the street I found him. Don't ask me how I knew, but I'm glad he was there because he needs another operation. I've got to help him and I've got to do it now."

She helps Hieu into the van that is waiting to take her to the rubbish tip community and she wraps her big arms around him as she borrows someone's mobile phone and rings the hospital. "Dr Han, I want to fix up an appointment for a little child with polio. You'll love him. He has eyes like the moon and a smile like the sun. No, don't worry about the cost. I'll fix that."

She turns to Hieu. "Until you go back to the hospital you'll stay with me in my own home. You can have a wash and I've got a mattress you can sleep on in a little room. Would you like that? Ah yes, I knew you would."

The lowly community, in their thrown-together wooden and grass huts on the fringe of the city rubbish tip have heard she is coming. There's a reception committee of children who smother her as she steps from the van, tots grabbing her legs, older ones trying to climb into her arms. And Hai, with a vivid scar creeping down his right thigh, standing without crutches and a huge grin on his soft face. Like a Pied Piper, she leads the children down the track, her arm wrapped around Hai's shoulder as they walk under a huge umbrella protecting them from the sun. "I love you Mama Tina," said Hai. "Thank you for being my friend." She responds by bursting into song...'I had a dream..." a curious scene as the Irish woman's strong voice booms out over the hovels where bags of salvaged garbage are stacked.

As she walks, she relives that old dream, accompanied by the same kind of children who had run towards her in her vision, but this time they are in her reach, sharing a joy that no one could imagine would ever be found in a village on the edge of a rubbish tip. But in a moment of sadness she remembers her own childhood and her eyes mist over. She knows all too well what the lives of these children are like.

"If I had the money," she says, "sniffing away the tears, "I'd pick up everybody and put them on an island in the Pacific Ocean and feed and teach them until they were strong and educated enough to step out into the world on their own. Yes, that's what I'd do. I hear people say that I'm doing a wonderful job, but it's not all me. It's my staff and it's the people themselves because they want to help themselves. They just have to have the chance to start."

"I'll never let anyone put a halo on me, not even The Man Upstairs because that's receiving a gift and I don't want to be rewarded any more than hearing a child laugh for the first time or watching a youngster walk on legs that had been given no chance. Those are my true rewards...."

The heat haze of the morning sun gives the impression of buckling the nearby railway line as, in another part of the city, Christina walks into an alley, so narrow that two people can barely pass one another. In a tiny shack, Phuc, an 11-year-old boy with cerebral palsy, lies on his back surrounded by his parents, two brothers and sister. This cramped, dark space in Nhieu Loc, Saigon's canal district, has been the family home for 13 years. "When I saw this family of six living in a box-like room, I knew I had to do something," she explains. "Even though the room floods when the rains come, they've been afraid of moving from the area because they thought they would lose their chance of being rehoused into a small flat somewhere with electricity. No one knows how long that will take, but in the meantime I was able to arrange for Phuc to have a special chair so he could sit up comfortably and then we fixed his father up with a motor scooter so he could earn a bit of money taking people around. It gives them a bit of a chance, you see."

She has to stoop low to reach into Phuc's shack and then she is standing with the laughing child in her arms and in the hut the other children are calling her name. It's a scene repeated wherever Mama Tina goes. She relates to children as if she's one herself, sometimes playfully chasing them along the street or trying to find them with her eyes closed. But now as she lowers Phuc into his home and walks further along the alley, that daily moment of sadness fills her perspiring face. "There are so many," she says, glancing down even smaller walkways. "Who knows of the terrible hardships being endured behind those doors?"

She is all too aware of the country's problems. "The government does its best. And it knows that I'm trying to do in co-operation with it. But it's a terribly poor country and all the sanctions that were imposed against it after the war didn't help one little bit, you know. The government's very supportive of what I'm doing but it hasn't got the money to back me. I'm just grateful it's letting me follow the path I must walk."

In the eight years since she has been in Vietnam, I am the first journalist to accompany her on her field missions. "I'm glad you could see the guts of my work," she says. "It's important for people to know that it's not just fund raising and sending the money to the poor and needing and keeping your fingers crossed that it goes to the right people. You've got to have communication of the spirit. If your spirit can talk to someone else's, even if you can't speak in the same tongue, you're going to carry someone up into the clouds.

"But you've got to work at it. You've go to go out into the streets and villages and feel the sweat running down your back and feel the mosquitoes biting you and smell things that would turn your stomach. You've got to push through that curtain of dread and go to the people on the other side and give them all a damn big hug because they need that as much as food in their bellies."

On the way out of the district, she is stopped by an 82-year-old great-great-grandmother. The toothless old woman knows who Christina is and what she has done for the afflicted Phuc. "Thank you," is all she says, but as usual it's more than enough. Mama Tina wraps her arms around the tiny woman and then, fighting back the tears, makes her way from the shadows of the alley into the sunshine. "There's so much to be done," she says, repeating words she often uses. "I must keep going. There are so many. And there's Mongolia too..." Mongolia? "Oh yes, I'm setting up in Mongolia. I'm off in a week or two. There are so many children there who need me. I don't think I'll ever leave Vietnam for good, but that doesn't stop me helping children in other countries. There are children everywhere who need help. I've got to do what I can while I can. I started to live out a dream when I came here, you know, but I don't believe I'm even half way through...."

For more information on how to sponsor a child, contact your local CNCF office.